[K-3D dev] K-3D future

[Romain Behar]

 Well, all comments show that K-3D still has its place
as a modeler on the Free Software scene.

 To answer questions that were left unanswered in the
past few weeks (I apologize for not posting as often
as I would; be assured that you don't talk to
yourself!), I'd say:
 - `make check` does fail, this is not a feature :)
the tests haven't been maintained for months
 - there are critical bugs with materials due to
unfinished changes in shaders handling
 - import/export function for Blender will be of
importance when the format specification is released
(POV 3.5 export has been on my mind for a while)
 - an OS X port of K-3D will depend on developers
doing the compilation, whether it's possible depends
on the GTK availability on this platform
 - sorry for other unanswered questions, feel free to
post to the mailing-list

 K-3D is currently built on GTK 1.2 based library
sdpGtk (bundled with K-3D). The first goal is to
switch to GTK 2.0; there are several ways to do it
(using different libraries). The first and obvious
way, is to port sdpGtk to GTK 2. The second one is to
port sdpGtk to GTKMM 2.0, which is the official C++
wrapper around GTK 2; this is the most difficult one,
since it involves quite a lot engineering if we want
to keep the dynamic XML-defined GUI, � la
libglade. The third one is to rewrite the GUI part
using GTKMM 2.0 and libglademm (IMHO, this is by far
the worst one since it yields lots of library
dependencies: GTK 2, GTKMM 2, libglade, libglademm,
etc). The last one (and my favorite) gets rid of
sdpGtk and the dynamic GUI to make a GTKML-free
application based on GTKMM 2.

 Another matter is splitting completely the 3D engine
from the GUI (P. Christeas), to have a commandline
application creating or modifying 3D scenes using
scripts. This might be useful to make automatically
generated animations, but I wonder how many people
would need such product or whether this already
exists. Some changes went toward separating tool
algorithms from the tools themselves, since the same
modifiers works for the tool and its animated
counterpart. A stand-alone engine might be a good
thing.

 Cheers,

  Romain


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