[Bf-committers] blender as ui for game engine

[homac]

Yes, I can! :D

1. I like coding.
2. I was looking for a library which reads .blend in Java without
    crashing, provides access to materials, animations, lighting etc.
    and has no dependencies on other libraries/game engines.
3. I was naive enough to think that it will be an easy task.
    But I stuck to my plan and made it work.

BTW: There have been discussions on a "Blender Plugin System" earlier 
(which is basically what you want, if I read you correctly). From my 
point of view, the baseline of this discussion is, that it is a lot of 
work and has multiple side-effects and therefore takes many years. Users 
will not get aware of the whole effort spend on the plugin system until 
the first thirdparty plugins appear which have features not available 
with python scripts or just better performance. But they will see, that 
progress of other projects slows down instead. Thus, as long as there 
are no trustworthy, reliable, experienced volunteers, who take the 
responsibility to work on it in cooperation with devs of the respective 
Blender submodules, for at least a couple of years, then there will be 
no plugin system.

Again, that is my personal opinion!

But a less intrusive solution to this is of course a C library for 
.blend files. Because, Blender's clipboard functionality (CTRL+C/CTRL+V)
uses a .blend file as well. I'm not familiar with RNA, but I assume it 
is possible to trigger CTRL-C from python and then run an external 
program to process the data to override objects with the results 
afterwards. That is a basically a loosely coupled plugin (even though it 
runs in its own process).

There are C libraries out there (e.g. assimp, don't know how stable) but 
the best solution would be to take the original source code + a proper 
interface and just link it into a library. (I talked to someone who had 
the same idea - don't remember his name, unfortunately.)


Regards
  Holger


On 21/01/16 20:33, Owen Hogarth II wrote:
> Blender is a massive code base and you've seen a lot of writing your java
> .Blend library. I am interested in implementing it, it's more a refactoring
> of the core blender c library which seems to put a lot of devs off,
> although I do understand that code base is massive.
>
> I am going to do this project because I am tired of dealing with
> proprietary and or closed source software especially as a game dev where
> you'll be using a tool and the original devs disappear or just whatever.
>
> Holger in your emails to the list you made a statement to the effect that
> you were getting off into the weeds writing that java .Blend library. Can
> you share what was the original project that made you decide to write your
> library?
>
> Best,
> Owen
>