[Robotics] Verson Control of .blend files

[Gilberto Echeverria]

Hello everybody,

We are now a bit further in the development of the openRobotSimulator on 
Blender, working with two developers. We have a fair amount of 
components defined, each of them in separate .blend files.
The idea is to be able to store each component separately (sensors, 
robotic parts, cameras, etc.) and put them together into a new .blend 
file to assemble any particular kind of robot.

It is at this point that we come to face two problems:

1. Maintaining a consistent repository of the .blend files
We are currently using a repository in Launchpad, using bazaar. This is 
now creating a problem, since there doesn't seem to be any change merger 
inside of the .blend files, because they are binary files. So working 
concurrently makes change control a problem. This applies to changes 
both to the python scripts inside the blender files, as well as to the 
3D models of the components.
How do the Blender Foundation projects keep track of their files? For 
instance for the films and games developed in Blender.

2. To create a new robot, we do 'appends' of the component pieces.
For example, append a camera to a robot.
If the same process is repeated, the new objects for the robot and 
components get new names like robot.001, camera.001, along with the 
scripts and textures associated to them. This creates a lot of problems 
with the python scripts, since they have to guess the new names. Is 
there a way to keep things like scripts and materials as links shared by 
several objects?

I hope my questions are not too confusing. Any help with this problems 
will be greatly appreciated.

All the best

Gilberto