[Verse-dev] preparing public verse usage testing with ED data

[Emil Brink]

Toni Alatalo wrote:
> hi,

Hi!

> we already did some preparations and plans for using the public verse 
> server, at uni-verse.pdc.kth.se , for publishing some Elephants Dream 
> data, back then in Stockholm during the review week. i'd like to 
> continue that now so that we can announce it for testing, like put a 
> news article on the blender.org site with a link to forum / irc channel 
> where people can give feedback / ask questions. i hope the timing is ok 
> for others if we do that e.g. next week or the week after that? (after 
> the ED on-line & summer-of-code crazes have settled down)

That sounds like a nice plan. I would have loved for the announcement to
have been made *before* the ED DVD:s reached people, just to bask in a
borrowed glow of exclusitivity, but you can't get everything.

> right now the Jorma bird i put there, and the Proog head that Eskil and 
> Emil prepared, seem to be on the server still  - good. we'll add at 
> least a telephone pole for the bird to have some environment, and other 
> ED things if we find something appropriate (ideas are welcome!).

Excellent!

> the meshes show ok with the verse-blender testbuild that was published last 
> year, but those versions don't have texture support yet (the downloads 
> are at http://www.blender.org/cms/Verse-Blender.verse_blender.0.html). i 
> know Jiri merged his branch with current blender quite recently - dunno 
> if you could easily do it now/soon again, and should we then prepare a 
> new test release of that for this event? oh and the coordsyst bug would 
> be good to fix (verse-blender has diff. directions than other verse 
> tools :)

Yeah, the coordinate system issue is ... well-known, at least. I hope
Jiri has the time to fix that, so an improved version of Verse-Blender
could be offered in parallel with any announcement we make.

> other preparations on top of my head include server utilies - back at 
> KTH we talked about there beeing some sort of simple admin tool to it 
> (like a hidden web page) with at least a Reset button, that some of us 
> can press when someone has deleted all the data on the server, or 
> something. could that and/or other necessary things be done for this, 
> soonish?

Sounds reasonable, although I know next to nothing about the actual
server machine, or its maintenance. Perhaps Mattias could offer some
insight? I have no idea what it would involve to run some kind of
CGI on it with a few buttons for basic maintenance tasks. I think I
did a backup of the server's contents a few weeks ago, using just the
normal VML saver tool.

> what else should we do and take into consideration? i guess we all agree 
> with Ton (we just talked a bit on irc) that this is best presented as a 
> public testing project.

Yeah, why not make it public. :)

Regards,

/Emil