[Bf-committers] Thinking about a "community edit mode" for blender

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

There was indeed experimental Verse integration for this sort of
thing, but it never got to a finished state. The idea was that Verse
would be integrated in various applications and game engines, and that
you could then interchange data. The main issue I guess is that
synchronizing data is a hard problem, and that it's difficult to add
this into Blender or other 3D app designs which weren't designed from
the ground up with this in mind.

For exporting to a game engine, I think this can work and could be
implemented as an addon. But it's still a hard problem, especially if
you want to do 2-way syncing. For Blender-Blender syncing, I don't see
it happening, syncing all data structures is too much work to get
reliable, with a game engine you only have to consider a subset, same
as when writing an exporter.

One mistake with Verse in my opinion is that it tried to be too fine
grained in syncing, it's nice in theory to only send changed vertices,
but this all just becomes incredibly complex when you consider that
you have to sync all data at this level. It's better to work at the
level of entire datablocks in my opinion, and if you want to optimize
data transfer then maybe use an rsync like algorithm.

Brecht.

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 5:05 PM, Gaia <gaia.clary at machinimatrix.org> wrote:
> I remember there was some attempt to add a multi user mode for blender
> (I think there was something setup in 2.4) The key idea was that 2 or
> more users could share one Blender 3dView and do concurrent editing on
> the objects right in blender.
>
> I would like to even add another thought: Maybe it is possible to setup
> a bridge between blender and an online world, such that you can edit an
> object in blender which is actually located in an online environment (or
> visualize an object that is actually located in blender in an online
> world) . I guess that all of this is far from trivial. But maybe it
> would be fun to start thinking about how that could be done. Or if the
> groundwork has already been done,  maybe it makes sense to make a
> "production ready" tool (Addon?). As far as i know there was some work
> on this done for "RealExtent" a while ago...
>
> Do you have any opinion on such a development ? Does it make sense, are
> there better ways to go, is it doable, feasible ? Anybody working on it
> even ?
>
> cheers,
> Gaia
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