[Bf-committers] [BGE Proposal] Improvement of dupli-groups for better workflow, new features, missing stuff (with working implementation)

[Alex Fraser]

Hi Martin,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Martin Sell <m.sell_a at stud.fh-sm.de> wrote:
> 1) first part: group references
>
> At the moment, you can't detect at runtime if the object controller
> owner is part of a group. The duplicating object also doesn't know about
> its group members. There is no (easy) way to get the necessary
> references. My proposal is to provide an improved interface for
> KX_GameObjects. Here you can find the complete proposal:
>
> http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Moerdn/_Blender_2.5_Feature_Proposal

+1, this would be very useful. In the past I have wanted to access
properties defined on the pivot. Your proposal meets that need.

Please keep parenting instances to the pivot optional - in many of my
groups, I want the objects to act independently. I see from your
videos that parenting needs to be done after instantiation with a
script; that's fine with me. We could add an option in the GUI to
automate that at a later date.

My only suggestion is to change the terminology: "pivot" implies that
the objects are parented to it. How about renaming "pivot" to "group",
and "instance" to "member"?

> I've already implemented this small feature and it would be nice if the
> BGE devs could take a closer look. This page also contains patches, a
> windows build and some links to youtube that demonstrates some of the
> possibilities.

I haven't tried your patch yet, but the videos look great.

Cheers,
Alex