[Bf-taskforce25] data api proposal

[Matt Ebb]

Hi, just a couple of notes on things I've seen, I hope I'm not looking
at this on the wrong level

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 3:47 AM, Brecht Van Lommel <brecht at blender.org> wrote:

> The default value, that is something I didn't include in the proposal
> indeed. If we want a function to reset to the default we'll need it.
> Would be good if we could avoid duplicating them from all the add_*
> functions in blenkernel/, but should be possible I think.

If this is the case, it would also be very nice to make possible the
capability for users to be able to define their own default settings.
It's something I've often wished for when doing the same sequence of
clicks over and over again when I add an object, or set up a particle
system, or whatever.

> This is the intention, bitflags should be exposed as booleans. The
> integer type would be used for just that, integer numbers.

This may be a non-issue, but it just made me think, will there be any
implications to changing these data types further down the track? For
example I've seen in a few places in Blender where unfortunately a
bitflag has been used, not really as a genuine true/false boolean
value, but as a switch between two options. Then later down the line
you realise that you want a third option as well, would this cause any
concerns (other than just rewriting the functions that use it)?


And on the topic of limits - I saw some mention on the issue of hard
and soft limits. This is something that currently causes a bit of
grief in Blender, there are hardcoded arbitrary limits everywhere. If
I understand the proposal, this would be really great, to have a
'hard' limit that's the absolute maximum it can possibly me (for some
things, that max stored by that datatype), and a soft limit that gets
displayed in the UI. It would be great to have functions to be able to
update that soft limit - i.e. in Shake, if you have a slider from 0.0
- 1.0 and you type in 5.0, the slider then changes to show a range
between 0.0 - 5.0.


But yeah, so far so good! Sounds very interesting indeed, I need to
get around to finishing up a doc I started writing ages ago, but
that's on a higher level than the discussions now.

cheers

Matt