[Bf-taskforce25] Blender spring cleaning

[Matt Ebb]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> from reading williams post +1 in general though there are some
> spesific I'm not sure of, no opinion on render window.

> Other things I have mentioned before but not in 1 list :)
> - remove IFDEF's for BeOS and AMIGA in the code
> - remove Amiga and HamX image formats
> - remove videoscape format support
> - remove C coded dxf, vrml support
> - drop current radiosity code (talked to ton and he's ok not to port it over)
> - remove sumo (solid) from the BGE
> - remove ODE, QHull which bullet physics wont use
> - Personally Id advocate dropping Irix support too since its been 'End
> of life' for quite some years now but others probably want to keep
> maintaining it.

+1 to all of these *especially* radiosity.

Also +1 to getting rid of the old track etc.

As for the render window, the old render window is gone (thankfully)
and won't be back. What can be done potentially as an option, is what
has already been mentioned, popping open an image editor into a new
window for people who want it. There's already a mechanism in Blender
2.5 for reopening windows at the same size/location (it's used when
opening saved files with multiple windows) so that would be simple.

As for Nathan's lighting/shading points, I disagree. Not that the
shading system wouldn't benefit from a lot of changes, but rather it
needs much bigger structural changes than these sort of things - IMO
it's polishing a turd :) The idea of 'shaders' as they appear in
Blender are not overly useful, especially if we want Blender to be
more ready for future rendering developments. Anyway, ideally such
changes should also be done by introducing new materials, so the
behaviour of old materials can be kept around for a while for
backwards compatibility. In summary there's a lot more work to be done
than these tweaks and needs to be done properly.

+1 to backbuf, you're much better off doing this in the comp, but also
I'd love to kill off most of the world shading system too (but
properly, at a later date).

+1 to bbone rest, stride root, W button, un-real modifiers.

-1 to the idea of removing slow parent. Yes it can get you into
trouble, but when you use it correctly (you need to bake it for render
farms etc), it's still very useful. We've used it several times lately
on kajimba. It can be removed when there's a good replacement
available - bullet is not it at this stage.

Matt