Blender 2.5 out of Beta

[dthumb]

Time to relearn everything lol.

download link

[fore]

But don't hold your breath on that :D

 

I doubt that for the existing games we will ever be able to use Blender 2.5. It's not Blender, it's the interfaces. There are 3 of them, which all need to fit together. And why should developers of those interfaces invest into a dead-end format (Nif)?

 

Speaking for animations, there are enough bugs and ToDos which I personally would prefer to be fixed, and they are open for a long time. I don't want to complain, I'm very happy to have all those tools in place. But it simply shows the current support. No wonder after so many years.

[Alecu]

Skyrim is going to use nif so if people won't develop exporters for skyrim it will be bad.

 

On the other hand some things can made in blender 2.5 and then exported in 2.4. I don't know too much about bugs but the developers of blender took a huge detour from blender 2.4. A LOT of things were rewritten and recoded so bug's are to be expected. And I don't think that the community or support is that bad. It's just that the changes were a bit too much for the developers in such short amount of time. Core things that have been stable but were limiting the program had to be rewritten in c and python. That's like changing the kernel of the windows. And the changes caused more and more changes in the upper layers of the program.

 

Personally I'm amazed by this achievement. Usually massive companies can do this sort of things.The changes now should have major impact in the future too allowing more room for new improvements.

With the previous versions of blender they reached a bottle neck and a lot of important features had to be remade. There was a known fact that blender previous versions had serious trouble with the user interface when it came to multiple windows. It had to be rewritten from scratch. And so did the interaction with the user interface and the way it handles events. From a programming view point it's really nice at lest for me. And the pace of which blender is evolving is still big.

 

It's like the evolution from xp to windows vista with microsoft.

 

Things aren't that grim.

[Pronam]

The Nif development team has been working on 2.5 for a long bit already. Once they are ready to release they will, with skyrim it'll probably take some time before they adjusted to the updated format. (as I doubt everything will be the same, like with all changes with oblivion->fallout)

NIF isn't a dead format, it is going to be used for Skyrim, which is confirmed and it's likely other games will use it again as well.

[Alecu]

The Nif development team has been working on 2.5 for a long bit already. Once they are ready to release they will, with skyrim it'll probably take some time before they adjusted to the updated format. (as I doubt everything will be the same, like with all changes with oblivion->fallout)

NIF isn't a dead format, it is going to be used for Skyrim, which is confirmed and it's likely other games will use it again as well.

 

 

Plus there were a lot of changes to the python api from beta to beta so it wasn't a very good idea to write the scripts if the classes,methods kept changing and ruining compatibility for the scripts. But now the python api is finalized and it won't change long from now. Everything has been done to allow many more new elements in the 2.6 series.

[fore]

Ooops, that will teach me to read every available Skyrim article completely ;)

 

I was absolutely sure that changing the engine would automatically result in an interface switch. I'm surprised that this is not the case. The propriatary NIF?

 

On one hand it's a real win, since modelling can start so much earlier for skyrim. But don't we wish to finally get an interface which is fully documented?

[LHammonds]

I was in communication with the developers of niftools back when they were releasing updates left and right. There was a point they reached when they decided to stop development of the 2.4x branch and put a freeze on it since it was very stable and then focus on the conversion to the Blender 2.5x branch...but only start the actual coding when we finally got a non-beta of the 2.5x branch so they will have a solid API for programming. There was just too much changing from beta to beta and any work done during that timeframe could possibly be for nothing.

 

So unless something has changed, I think the niftools developers are working on getting a PyFFI and NIF Scripts version ready based on 2.57 which was released on April 13th.

 

And yes, Skyrim will be using the NIF format so there are many reasons to port the old code over to the new version of Blender.

 

One of the biggest changes I think will be the code related to animation since it is completely different from 2.4x to 2.5x.

 

To help others get familiar with Blender and the particulars of modding these games, I plan to re-release videos I created using 2.4x for the new 2.5x system...but only after the niftools are released for it obviously. :thumbsup:

LHammonds

[greywaste]

 

 

To help others get familiar with Blender and the particulars of modding these games, I plan to re-release videos I created using 2.4x for the new 2.5x system...but only after the niftools are released for it obviously. :thumbsup:

LHammonds

 

It'll be much appreciated since it appears Max development has snuffed it entirely :( :( :(

[Alecu]

Also, hopefully some new things that are already in development might come for blender too in later versions.

 

For a long time people have always complained about being limited to triangles and quads in blender. Well, there is BMesh for that.It supports NGons but it's much more than that having some really advanced features. It's a new kernel system for editing meshes. The system itself is done but the huge problem is integrating the system with the current tools:

 

Blog about BMesh

 

I've already downloaded the latest bmesh source code and compiled it. So far it runs really nice though it has some bugs when you have complex figures

 

This is how it looks:

 

http://i435.photobucket.com/albums/qq72/Alecu100/blenderbmesh.png

 

The best things about this one is the awesome knife tool.

 

And then there is another useful thing called Unlimited Clay:

Blog about Unlimited Clay

 

This one is very nice because it allows you to sculpt your model using sculpt tools indefinitely. After a certain points it starts adding new vertices to the model in the sculpted areas so you have plenty of room go to in deeper and sculpt even more details into your model.

 

I guess in one year time or maybe more we will see these too addons in blender. But especially the BMesh is something extremely hard to get working with 50 tools or more that blender has to offer so it's going to be a real challenge.

[LHammonds]

I found the old links related to Blender 2.4x --> 2.5x and the niftools team:

 

Nifscripts moving to blender 2.5x - This was a poll to find out if modders wouldn't mind holding off on new releases while the 2.5x branch is developed. It was 9 to 0...unanimous to put 2.4x on hold for 2.5x development.

 

Niftools developer thread on Moving to Blender 2.5x

 

Progress to the code commits to the master branch (which is for Blender 2.5x): Blender nif script commits

 

LHammonds