[Bf-committers] Some Ideas for a Blender Plugin System (hewi)

[hewi jupama]

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>> What's wrong with something depending on string.h?

It's GHOST, the engine of blender, the contact between OpenGL and extension wrappers and all, if I am correct.  
It means the same as your car engine will not run unless you have plugged in the right hand side back seat passengers seat belt.  mmmh ... not really


>> A black box that never fails, no matter how strange the code is that
>> links into it, I think that can't exist. 

Never fails is a utopia, but it should be restricted to the minimum (failing) and when it does, it should be up and running in the blink of an eye.

Story of Hamilton's steering wheel software (SWS).  of the 100's of races and test, his steering wheel software broke down once, indeed, once.  He pushed the reset button, in the blink of an eye the car was controllable again (black box with core functionality).  He drove on.  While all plugins were loaded, the engineers found the speed control in pit lane plugin was erroneous.  He did not push that button again, at least not during this race.  I think he even won the race ...

>> Of course we all aim at rock solid software, but I don't see how
>> third-party plugins will help with that.

That's why I tried to convince you with the tank example, apparently I failed

> An other nice example of a good plug-in would be a browser.
> Wouldn't that be cool to be able to browse inside Blender :)

>> I desperately don't want that.

Well then don't plug it in :)  If I do not want a passenger seat in my race car, than I don't put one in either


>>  I don't share the vision that a plugin system is the only approach to this, or that
>> will make things easier to develop & fix.

Which approach would you suggest?


>>Recently at blender conference there was a presentation showing custom
>> cloth solver using numpy:
>> https://www.blender.org/conference/2015/presentations/178

way too complicated,  I still want to start with the array modifier plugin.

As many of you suggested and ventilated many times before, we have enough people who do the blah blah, but not enough really doing the boem boem.  For a while I have looked and tried to find a way into the coding of Blender, but I wanted to start at the core, that is hard.  This is a good opportunity for me to do some Boom-Boom ;)

So, on that bomb-shell, I am looking to touch base with Mr Martin Felke.  Unfortunatelly, I am not allowed any more to look at the subscribers list of this mail thread.  So I cannot mail him directly.  Any help with getting this 'project' started would be most welcome.

Kindest regards

Hewi