Blender Conference - Page 2

Blender Conference

Discuss the source code and development of Spring Engine in general from a technical point of view. Patches go here too.

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Tim Blokdijk
Posts: 1242
Joined: 29 May 2005, 11:18

Re: Blender Conference

Post by Tim Blokdijk »

Back from the conference and had a good conversation with Ton. I didn't manage to ask all the questions and remarks you guys posted here within the 10-15 minutes. But after an hour I more or less did.
Now I have to write out his ramblings and translate it in English, I don't have time for that until next week.
He clearly knows what he wants, and that's a full length open source feature film. Avatar style. He's just looking for the right business model and a few million.

Other observations form the conference:
People either never heard of Spring or go like "You work on Spring! ohh that's so co├│ol, can I shake your hand?". At which point I carefully explain that I very much limit my involvement to things that I happen to think are important.
Unfortunately Ton wasn't part of the second group, he vaguely remembers skimming the Spring site. Real shame, real shame.
Anyway, the open source gaming people.. they know about Spring.

It's also interesting to see the the stuff people are using Blender for.. if I break it down in four category's:
* Art (film, pictures, 3d printing)
* Game development (entertainment, casual, serious gaming)
* Scientific (bio, archaeology, simulation visualisation)
* Architecture (CAD, visualisation, material usage)

The science and architecture people are still a bit like "We're doing some things with Blender now but if we could do x, y and z with Blender, that would be valuable."
And they are clearly networking to get x, y and z. I suspect that once these people get past their feasibility studies and other processes their money may influence Blender development a lot more then the Art and Game categories.

And there were teachers from academies around the world that are really serious about setting up "expertise" centres for Blender. In a similar fashion that there are AutoCAD expertise centres. Now the problem is that setting this up is a lot of work and will take time. But these are real institutions with paid people that want this to happen.

There was also this somewhat sensitive topic floating around, namely changes to the user interface. There are forces in the Blender community that have set themselves up with the unholy task to make Blender more user friendly.
I suggest people to read up on this and the 97 comments as of writing.
It's a real shame I did not ask Ton about this. I would love to know his take on this topic. Guess I will have to mail him about it.

Anyway's, Blender isn't a static project, things are moving. And things have been moving for the past few years.
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hoijui
Former Engine Dev
Posts: 4344
Joined: 22 Sep 2007, 09:51

Re: Blender Conference

Post by hoijui »

wow... nice! and thanks! :-)
looking forward to your translation and transcription!
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MidKnight
Posts: 2652
Joined: 10 Sep 2008, 03:11

Re: Blender Conference

Post by MidKnight »

Wow!
It's exciting to hear that some people have actually heard about Spring, and even more exciting to know that there are initiatives underway to get Blender the recognition and use that it deserves.

I'm looking forward to your transcription as well! :-) !
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Tim Blokdijk
Posts: 1242
Joined: 29 May 2005, 11:18

Re: Blender Conference

Post by Tim Blokdijk »

Just so people know, real life is keeping me occupied. Maybe the weekend. Maybe not. When it's done I will post it on springinfo.info and link to it from here.
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very_bad_soldier
Posts: 1397
Joined: 20 Feb 2007, 01:10

Re: Blender Conference

Post by very_bad_soldier »

Tim Blokdijk wrote: Anyway, the open source gaming people.. they know about Spring.
Sad to hear. So, what is the reason then why they are not interested in spring? I hoped they just dont know it :|
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Tim Blokdijk
Posts: 1242
Joined: 29 May 2005, 11:18

Re: Blender Conference

Post by Tim Blokdijk »

Maybe I can better rephrase that as "the Blender gaming people know about Spring". Or even more specific, the people that want to build "real" games and search for open source game engines seem to find and evaluate Spring.

They're not working with the Spring engine mainly because of different interests/projects. There were for example a bunch of university students building an engine for a mmrpg type game.
See http://thorworks.org/?p=46 if you want to know about it. It's mainly in a concept phase, but some parts are working. The blender integration is interesting.

Others were doing phone app game development, html5/flash stuff or made "games" for trade expositions. Some knew Spring, others didn't.
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