[Bf-committers] BGE API - was 2.49 release proposal

[Mitchell Stokes]

These are some good suggestions. I'll what I can do (or who I can poke :P )
about them. However, I think a few points need to be made.

On 1. This makes sense for most actuators. But a few should return a name,
like Add Object's object property since there is no object for it until it's
actually added (at which point you can use GetLastCreatedObject()).

On 2. This may be used since there is an identifier for things besides
objects, there's also IM (image), MA (materials), and such. I don't know if
removing the prefix will cause issues, but probably not since Blender should
already be smart enough to know which to look for.

On 3. This would make things a whole lot nicer, and simpler.

Thanks again for your suggestions and interest in the topic!

--Mitchell "Moguri" Stokes

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 3:52 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hey there, not sure if these changes would be appropriate for 2.49 or
> 2.5  BGE api but will suggest them anyway and see what ya think.
>
> 1) return Objects, Meshes, not their names.
>
> BGE api by default will return an Object/Mesh name when running
> actuator.getObject() and similar. Its much more useful to return the
> object or mesh its self, since I found in many cases I needed to
> lookup the scenes for the object name since I wanted to check the
> objects location or a property on it.
> I added an optional argument for some of the actuators to get the data
> rather then the name, but with attributes there are no arguments so
> for existing scripts...
>  act.getObject() -> act.object.name
> ...If we decide to return Objects/Meshes rather then just names.
>
> 2) GET RID OF STUPID "OB" PREFIX EVERYWHERE!
> there is a reason id.name+2 is used throughout blenders code. Not sure
> why nobody picked this up in the BGE before a release.
> For those of your who are not aware "Suzanne" is known as "OBSuzanne"
> in the BGE, Having to do  'ob.name[2:]'  is annoying.
>
> 3) return Mathutils types Vector(), Matrix() etc.
> Its annoying that in C++ you can do vec1+vec2 but in the python API
> you have do this one axis at a time or convert to Mathutils types.
> We switched some parts of Blender.* api to use Mathutils types and
> surprisingly few scripts broke because in most cases they can be used
> interchangeably with tuples/lists.
>
> -------
> 1) and 2) I'm quite keen on having,  3) is just a nice touch.
> For the changes I mentioned scripts will need updating and this will
> break more then the proposed get/set -> attributes change.
> Otherwise all these changes are quite easy to do, I can probably find
> the time in the next few weeks.
> I'll also update scripts in YoFrankie's SVN repo.
>
> - Campbell
>
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 4:37 AM, Benoit Bolsee <benoit.bolsee at online.be>
> wrote:
> > I'm strongly in favor of a 2.49 release. There has been significant
> > improvements on the BGE side that deserve an official release:
> > VideoTexture, BGE API cleanup, bug fixes.
> >
> > For the BGE API cleanup, we plan to have a transition phase where the
> > old API will still be supported but will produce deprecation warnings on
> > the console. A 2.49 release will allow us to propose a smooth transition
> > from 2.4x to 2.50 by introducing the new API in 2.49 and dropping the
> > old in 2.50.
> > Then the procedure to upgrade the scripts will be as follow: run your
> > game under 2.49 with warnings enabled, fix the scripts until there is no
> > warning, the game is ready for 2.50!
> >
> > Without a 2.49 we will have to do the transition between 2.50 and 2.51,
> > which looks a bit odd, or worse between a unofficial release and 2.50.
> >
> > Of course if we decide to go for a 2.49 release, I'll make sure that the
> > new API and VideoTexture and fully ready for the release.
> >
> > /benoit
> >
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