[Soc-2013-dev] Weekly Report #2 BGE LoD and Bug Fixing

[Daniel Stokes]

==Progress==
This week I more or less finished getting the level of detail system
working in the viewport. I have also been getting more feedback on my
Blenderartists thread, including issue reports that I have fixed. Both mesh
and material level of detail are working. The level of detail system also
works well with group instances, allowing a user to setup levels of detail
on an object and instancing it throughout the scene.

As far as bug hunting goes, I have decided to hold off on bug fixing while
we are in BCon4 as the bug fixes have been going straight to Trunk. However
I did address one regression this week:
[#35811] Blenderplayer crash on closing if file saved with an actual
version<http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=35811&group_id=9&atid=306>(waiting
for response)

I have also began putting together a demo scene for the level of detail
system, though there isn't much to show there yet.

==Next Week's Plans==
Next week I should be able to at least mostly get the level of detail
system working in the BGE, at least for mesh and material levels of detail.
I also plan to make some progress on the demo level so users have a good
file to test the changes with.

==Problems/Questions==
I have been running into several problems when trying to assemble the demo
scene. I wanted to develop a way to procedurally place trees for a forest
level, however I ran into some problems with the script to do so.

First of all bpy.ops.object.add_named and bpy.ops.object.group_instance_add
cause Blender to crash (looks like something to do with the 3D cursor). I
was able to work around this by specifying a location for group_instance_add
(even if it was the default value).

Furthermore, adding many objects with group_instance_add becomes
impractical as each object takes approximately 2 seconds to add by the time
you reach 3,000 objects. I have not yet determined if the time complexity
is linear or exponential, but it certainly is not constant.

I have also been running into problems rebuilding my non-development
version of Blender. This is because I have been using vc2010 and SCons for
this, and vc2010 support was recently dropped. When trying to build with
SCons and vc2012 I have run into build errors about bool/true/false macro
redefinitions. I finally just pointed my shortcuts to a cmake build and
continued working.



Overall, things are going well and I am still on schedule.

Regards,
Daniel Stokes
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