All sorts of new ideas

[Trylon]

Well, I did say I was planning some major changes, didn't I?

Once you get started on something you discover so much more things to do....

Though still untested, I have currently about 90% of the rewrite of the plPhysical done, when I discovered something new - well, for me actually....

You know how, when importing, sometimes you get multiple materials for a single object?
Well, in Plasma those are stored as groups of vertexes (buffergroup), and can have a separate material each,

Turns out that blender has virtually exactly the same thing, called "vertex groups". That also can have separate materials.
Heh, Let's see how easily they can be used

On another note, I really should take a look at taking advantage of the multiple uv/maps blender now supports.

Question to anyone with some more knowledge:
If you know how I can emulate/extract blenders "orco" coordinate settings to uv/maps I'd like to hear it....

[Marcello]

Hi Trylon,

Sounds like you are having some fullblown eureka moments there . Sounds like the things you describe contribute to realising the stuff I mailed you about: multiple UV's per mesh and stencils.

Blender also has methods for texture animation. What are the changes they match up with Plasma too (just some wishful thinking here

Keep it up!

[BAD]

Sounds like you and Adam have a lot ot work on this weekend!

[Trylon]

Sigh,
probably so... I've been doing some work this evening, and I'm probably going to end up rewriting 50% of PyPRPs core functionality.
(Like import, drawables (though I finally understand the stupid things, now that we have more documentation), physical, resource manager export, etc)

Not, that that wasn't needed for way too long, but still, it would be nice if it wasn't necessary

[Trylon]

Yup, I'm still alive - well, still working an the plugin anyway.

I think you will like the new plugin - I slowly discovered more and more things to add, so there might be some suprises yet.

The UI will be a little different also - I've replaced the "I_agree_that_I_wont_use_cyan_stuff_without_bribing_moke_first" (well, it's a little different, but you get the idea ) variable by a nice dialog box that pops up whenever you are importing a cyan age, so you won't have to open up your text editor and change a value in the code before importing.

And, ofcourse, most changes will be under the hood - compleately rewriting the resource manager's export code, renaming variables to unlock new features, etc, etc, etc....

Currently I'm cleaning up again - a lot of code was meshed together by everyone adding little bits, and thus - understandibly - having quite some redundancy in the code. - Boring, but it has to be done

So far for my small update - have fun.

[Chacal]

That's great news, Trylon.
That's a lot of changes at one time. Do you need help for integrated or functional testing? Do you have a test plan?
I'm hacking away at prp files and I'm beginning to get an understanding, so yell if you need testers.

[Trylon]

Thanks - I'll probably be needing testers
And documentation writers - lots of them

We have a very basic test plan lying around for pyprp - it basically amounts to:

IF you can successfully import the ErcanaCitySilo AND if you can successfully export (with all functionality intact) our functionality test age THEN the plugin version is allowed to go into the trunk.

But, that has failed on a couple of occasions.
Besides that, the functionality test age would need a rewrite too, so a couple of testers would be nicer

[Chacal]

Maybe we should define more precisely "successfully import" and "successfully export".
I'm thinking of a script that would compare objects in the PRP with expected results.

[Marcello]

As you know... always ready to test!