IC meeting notes, sun april 27

irc.freeneode.net, #blendercoders
16:00 -18:30 CEST

Attending: Hos, LarstiQ, yoshi252, Green, aphex, segfant, phase4,  
philipp, desaster, marh, Unnnamed, Stubenhocker

Agenda:
- status of coding projects (for next release)
- release planning


-> new fonts & interface translation
- four libs will be added ftgl and freetype (static) and gettext and  
iconv (dynamic)
- each appointed platform manager will check on this, add installation  
docs if needed
- philipp works on direct translation code, so iconv might not be  
needed in the future (iconv is large)
- text encoding still is a big issue. Currently phase's interface  
allows a choice for encoding input (UTF-8, Latin blah, etc). The  
conversion lib for this still does not work for OSX. One solution is to  
skip this feature, and only allow one encoding style for input.
- philipp is working on the above issue (our won decoding code), phase  
will hold back commits on it until it's sorted out. LarstiQ is in  
contact with them as well, and together they'll decide how it actually  
will be released.


-> tuhopuu features in general:
- phase4 pastes a nice link: http://www.tncci.com/blender/feats.html
- Imagemagick support: this lib is not cross platform available, and  
causes troubles to get working too. not to mention its 5+ Mb size...  
decided was not to officially support it in Blender
- actually, only tiff and bmp import is at the shortlist to add in  
blender. We will promote someone writing that in our own (imbuf) image  
library.
- QuickTime support: for win & osx it all works fine, and can be  
supposed as installed by most windows users. This is still an issue  
that might violate the GPL (because QT for Win is actually not part of  
the OS at windows). We'll take the risk for that for 2.27, and solve  
the problems when they arise.
- QT also doesn't block blender from running when it is not available  
at your machine.
- libquicktime (for the unices) is still not finished, although it  
already has some useful support for movie read and write. We will  
evaluate that during the next month or so as well.
- Hos commits autoskinning code, and will put that in the changelog as  
well
- Green added a new drawing mode for lamp, no dashed lines anymore. Is  
considered old-fashioned! Opinions on this differed a bit with the  
attendants. But a user-pref for it is a bit overkill too. Decided was  
to accept it, and wait for actual improvements instead of talks! :-)
- Ton is translating comments in blender code. Finally at last!  
Desaster will look at how to patch this in Tuhopuu. Alternative is to  
start with a fresh bf-blender tree after merging the trees.
- Cessen's code: seems to be in Tuhopuu. Needs to be checked on  
(cessen: please contact LarstiQ)

-> preparing the release, merging code
- LarstiQ volunteered to do the merging, but he would like some  
assistance with it.
- LarstiQ also targets himself to get the auto* stuff finally working  
in 2.27
- both trees bf-blender and tuhopuu have to be 'frozen' for the next  
weeks, meaning only commits on the accepted features are allowed
- proposed is a 1 week 'freeze and merge' and 1 week 'test and build'  
schedule. With the rest of the maillist subscribers we will verify  
feasibility of it.


-> shortlist of approved 2.27 features: (remind me if I've missed stuff)
- new & antialised fonts in interface
- translation system for tooltips, buttons and menus, with support for  
non-latin charactersets
- 'rename file' option in FileSelect and ImageSelect windows
- 'remove file' option in ImageSelect
- rightmouse menu in Text window, for open/save file.
- windows: clipboard support for cut/paste
- Alt-m in textwindow: copies the text to the active (3d) Font Object  
in 3D window
- support for Freetype fonts in Font Object
- redesigned user pref buttons
- win & osx: support for QuickTime image (gif, tiff, psd) and movie  
(.mov) in/out
- more advanced shading model for rendering, including options for  
cartoon rendering
- autoskinning for Armatures
- all dutch comments translated in the code
- fill support for autoconf/automake in the code.

-> roundtable discussion
- Philipp has been working at XML conversion of the Blender file. The  
first results are very promising, so he would like feedback. Also to  
merge it in the official Blender tree.
http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/BlendXML/
- currently the converter runs as a stand alone application
- Philipp proposes to replace the .blend with xml files. That caused  
some stir. ;-)
- However, what most people agreed on is that for import/export this  
should be a very welcom addition to blender, as its builtin exchange  
format.
- libary size (expat, the xml parser) is 130k, not too bad.
- since it was already late, discussion on XML could not be finished in  
the meeting. Proposed was to move that to the maillist and/or later irc  
meetings. According to philipp this cannot make it for an early release  
anyway. More like 2.28 or 2.29.
- note from me: can we also then look at x3d?  
http://www.web3d.org/x3d.html
- there are also issues that relates to Python on this topic... also to  
be looked at in more detail later.

Next meeting sunday may 4? Problem a little bit is that Larstiq,  
Michel, Phase, Sateh and me sheduled a blender-coding-discussion  
afternoon/evening then.
I'll mail a separate message about this to the maillist...

Cya, and thanks everyone for attending!

-Ton-


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--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@xxxxxxxxxxx