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GSoC14 - Weekly Report #12

August 2nd - 8th - BGE Cleanup and Support

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This Week

• physics:
  • there are several bugs in the tracker related to instability when using a triangle mesh with dynamic objects. sergof has a patch for it that I updated, but it only slightly reduces the problem. I also looked into the possibility of automatically decomposing a 3D mesh into convex shapes using an existing algorithm. I found that bullet has a recent btConvexHullComputer, but after some discussion this seems too big of a change for the end of gsoc. Sergej Reich has already experimented with it and it had problems at the time (maybe it doesn't now). The algorithm can be heavy depending on the model, so it is probably better to provide an offline, interactive tool to decompose the mesh and use the saved result.
  • in a long discussion with Sergej Reich, we agree that allowing a triangle mesh in a dynamic object (specifically the character controller) is not desirable and is currently causing many bugs and instability. However, I still have doubts on how to remove this combination because there are files already saved with the option.
  • started looking into exposing vehicle controller
• physics documentation:
  • The on progress dev documentation is here, some of it is still on paper, I have to copy to digital
  • I checked the user wiki on bge physics. It seems to have been all written by a summer of documentation student. It is missing quite some features and outdated. Though some parts are not bad, I dislike the organization, and parts of the text are really unprofessional. I cleaned up these where I saw it, but he did write a lot, so I don't expect to be able to expunge all of it in the last week. What I will aim for is to write new, focused and currently missing pages on the specific parts I am working on, such as the vehicle controller. (with demo file).
• I talked to several people and left the slowparent/constraint proposal more complete.
• fixed bugs related to the slow parent feature
• the branch merge is still waiting for final mentor review and approval

General Development

• minor cleanups - 16741f0 5a511eb

Fixed (Reported)

None

Fixed (Unreported)

• slow parent motion in the game engine - 1a1fcba
• slow parent motion in the viewport - 06a86b9
• negative values in the game engine for the slow parent weight parameter - bbf6b05

Closed / Archived / Invalid

• T41214 - axisValues are different between Linux and Windows
• T41365 - BGE doesn't support UTF8 from python script with Text property. Text resolution is very bad and RAM consumption very hight.

Total: 3 fixed, 2 closed

Next Week

• gsoc wrap up is looking good - the bug goal tracker is nearly met and I foresee no delays with the vehicle wrapper, I am just missing some documentation.
• finish vehicle wrapper, docs and demos
• I will be attending siggraph, so it will be a very busy week