[Soc-2012-dev] Multitouch Weekly Report

[Nick Rishel]

The most important thing that was accomplished this week was a redesign of
how context is handled. Instead of standardizing context in the WM and GE,
the Touch Manager will include a means for extending a generic context into
one specialized to either handle Blender or BGE touch events, similar to
how GHOST handles different operating systems. Thus far, working through
the design of handling contexts has been my single largest roadblock, with
several of my original ideas not working due to Blender vs BGE dependencies.

Dealing with context in this manner solves many of the problems that kept
popping up, and is already leading to the nicer code I was looking for. :)

Next week is SIGGRAPH, which I will be attending. I do not expect to get
very much accomplished as a result, though I will focus on
reworking/cleaning the existing code around this new idea of handling
contexts.

Full post:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:PrototypeNM1/Weekly_Report#Week_11
Week 11 Friday

I have finally settled on a manner of handling context that satisfies the
needs of both Blender and BGE. Instead of standardizing the contextual
information before sending it to the touch manager, the touch manager will
have a Context object. This object is extended to either interpret Blender
or BGE's input with respect to the context. In doing this, I can now work
with both Blender's and BGE's context types directly in my own library,
instead of figuring out where to best put it in the existing code base
while trying to best work around different type definitions.

Now among my TOUCH_Types, I can create a separate context container for
both Blender and BGE, for the game engine and WM will fill and blindly pass
to the touch manager. The touch manager will then feed the input to the
Context object, which will type and translate the context, and return it as
a string for the touch manager to use for interpretation.

Working under the assumption that Blender and BGE were more alike than
different has caused me quite a bit of grief up until this point. This put
me in the wrong frame of mind while looking at the issue of handling
contextual information, as I tried to understand how to best force one into
the other. This new solution is significantly more elegant, and does not
compromise overall function of touch in either Blender or BGE.

I believe this method might also provide the means for dealing with BGE
playing in Blender. This is only a hunch based on the BGE code I have
glossed over.

I was hoping that I might have had something for show before SIGGRAPH, but
this is seeming very unlikely at this point.
Next Week

I will be attending SIGGRAPH next week, all week. I will work on this
project in the downtime I have, but I am not expecting to have much of it.

One thing I do hope to accomplish is tidying up my code. After working on
the code with several visions of how it might look, I'm starting to notice
that the seams are becoming a bit frayed, and several unnecessary bits are
being left in.
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