[Bf-committers] blender as ui for game engine

Thu Jan 21 10:02:43 CET 2016

actually I found the email I was digging at, it appears he got it working?

Hello There!

As some of you know, I've implemented a toolkit, consisting of a code
generator and a runtime I/O module to map the full Blender DNA to Java
classes and allow reading and writing of files (cf. [1]).

All that is fine but won't help a developer as long as he/she don't know
the meaning of those generated classes and its member variables. Thus,
they will need source code documentation, to be provided in the
generated code.

Since providing documentation to blender sources is not the right way, I
came up with the idea to provide a documentation system, maintained
separate from blender source. I picked that up in the Minecraft modder
community, and thought it is a neat idea. There, it is basically a
string table, which maps names of classes and their members to
deobfuscated names (and the same for documentation, if I remember correct).

I took that idea and made it a bit more flexible, and object oriented,
added mechanisms such as merging and inheritance of documentation,
combined it with a versioning system and took JSON as basic format.

Then I've extracted available documentation from python API (thanks to
Ton's advice) and source code using doxygen into my documentation system
to fed it to my code generator. Both is not satisfying: Python API
actually provides documentation of RNA, which is quite similar to DNA
but still different, and the source code documentation is not addressed
to API developers, since DNA is not intended to be available to them, I
guess.

Thus, I still have huge gaps in the documentation that have to be added
manually, somehow, but I can't provide it on my own (I'm already way off
track with this thing). To prevent wasting a lot of time of API
developers by forcing everyone of them to read blender source code to
figure out what they can actually do with the data, I'm planning to
setup some kind of community-driven source code documentation system
similar to a wiki, based on what I already have. My current idea is to
just host the JSON files in a separate repository on github so everybody
can easily share knowledge gained from studying blender source code by
sending in pull requests [2].

When I mentioned that idea on a forum, someone pointed out, that others,
e.g. the C language guys, might be interested in the documentation as
well and I should discuss it with you for more elaborated input. Since
this is a bit of a longer story, and even non-blender developers may
want to throw in their thoughts, I decided to post it on the mailing list.

So, what do you think about the idea? Are you interested to support it
from your side or even contribute to it? Or do you rather want to host
it yourself?

The documentation could even be turned into wiki entries, if you want,
since it is in machine readable format.

Regards
  Holger Machens

[1] http://homac.cakelab.org/projects/JavaBlend/
[2] https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/

Ton seemed to think it was useful

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 12:52 AM, Owen Hogarth II <gurenchan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Jacob that's usually where it all ends up, stalled. They are trying to
> write a java parser for the python code when in all actuality if the core
> of blender was reorganized a bit, there would be no need for these types of
> things. c is universal, blender is built on c and for ease of use the
> blender team decided to allow python scripts to allow more users to write
> useful tools which they do, no doubt about that.
>
> But for this type of work those things will only cause trouble, python to
> java or those topical fixes seem to work for a while until you run into
> memory issues, how does python manage memory vs java, do you want to deal
> with trying to maintain that?
>
> reorganizing the c code and then engines can speak directly to blender.
> There won't need to be separate code to maintain, it will be a part of the
> main blender repo. You tell blender how to export models from c and your
> game engine interprets that data however you choose. Want blender to
> triangulate your mesh, write resources to a certain format, etc... That can
> all be done from c but it's not easy to get to the way the current blender
> code is organized.
>
> If you follow all those people who've attempted to do a topical fix they
> all get burnt out and sorta walk away or just disappear. The google code
> guy who did the android port, where did he go after the summer of code?
> Around 2011 there was a lot of excitement around that project and it just
> fizzled out. I am pretty sure he left one because time was up but also
> managing memory from two different languages with different memory models
> is not easy to solve. It's going to take looking at the problem in a
> different way and a little time to make serious changes. That's why I am
> looking for the community support.
>
> Best,
> Owen
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 4:42 PM, Jacob Merrill <blueprintrandom1 at gmail.com
> >
> wrote:
>
> > sorry bad link -
> >
> >
> > I'm aiming to create a generic (any version) import/export of Blender
> > files for Java.
> >
> > So far, I've developed a tool which uses the type information from your
> > StructDNA to generate Java classes which serve as type safe facets to
> > access data from .blend files. Finally found a suitable concept for the
> > type mapping to Java (considering pointers, type casts and the dirty
> > stuff possible in C ;)).
> >
> > Now, I wanted to add a loader which actually just needs to organise the
> > incoming data, which comes in instances of the generated data model, in
> > some "Library". The same way as you do it in struct Main (BKE_main.h).
> > But I have to admit, that I've got lost in your code there - because you
> > are scanning for blocks with IDs "LI" and "ID" which does not exist in
> > my reference file (v2.69).
> >
> > Are those not in all files or is that code for earlier file versions?
> > I've read the short intro in blendloader/internal/readfile.c which made
> > me confused looking at the content of my file.
> >
> > Can someone of you give me some (brief) hints on how it is supposed to
> > work?
> >
> >
> > Regards
> >   Holger
> > homac at strace.org
> >
> > On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 12:41 AM, Jacob Merrill <
> > blueprintrandom1 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I don't know if this is what your looking for
> > >
> > > https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/add+on+java/1513f8f84cc1e25d
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 12:40 AM, Jacob Merrill <
> > > blueprintrandom1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I am not sure how the android blender players of the past handled it,
> > >> but I know they were not 100% functional anyway,
> > >>
> > >> I did notice a email from ton about a Java backbone thing for addons,
> > >>
> > >> I will dig.
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bf-committers mailing list
> > Bf-committers at blender.org
> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>