toxi.in.process

Friday, January 26, 2007

Maintenance & brief status updates

I always seem to forget how busy I'm usually becoming at the beginning of each new year. There does seem to be a pattern emerging or maybe it has to do with a combination of long winter nights and my lack of new years resolutions (okay, I've got a single one: need new website!) which keep other people busy with other things in January. Am currently engaged in various really exciting (albeit commercial) projects again and so any noticeable developments on the Sunflow P5 library front had to be delayed before I feel more comfortable to release it publicly. The important stuff works already (i.e. exporting triangles), however camera support, shaders and lighting still are an incomplete mess... There's also a separate command line tool I've written to batch renderer frame sequences. Working on this stuff in my spare time also makes it really quite hard to realistically predict when things become ready. Someday I'll learn not to do that anymore... ;)

Speaking of Sunflow though, Christopher has released a new version (0.07.1) of the renderer and the website has been overhauled too. There's also talk about changing the scene file format and Stephen Williams of Fluidforms is interested in writing/collaborating on a generic (RenderMan format based) external renderer for Processing. All great stuff on the horizon!

Speaking of more maintenance, Florian Jennett has kindly modded the Processing forums to export the most recent posts as RSS. This is great stuff, since my current feed of the same content (launched almost exactly 2 years ago) was semi-broken for quite a while now, ever since the forum's HTML template changed last. I've tried to keep up with these changes initially, but had to succumb sometime last year. Unlike this old feed which was created via screen-scraping, the new one is coming straight out of the forum, so hopefully will not miss out posts or truncate them anymore...

Finally, my "digital self" is still fragmenting more & more since I've started contributing to Matt Pyke's Everyoneforever group blog.

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