Developer *Fail* Moments
on July 14th, 2010, by ideasman42Over the course of the project its come to my attention that as developers we get it pretty easy with lots of encouraging comments from the community, however I worry that we don’t properly communicate the troubles we invariably cause when poking about with Blender.
To this end, here is a laundry list of memorable mistakes we made during the project.
– Campbell ๐
- Wondering why his IP address has a collision with the server, Brecht changed it so his system could become a contributing render node, for some reason nobody can access the server.
- Campbell spent 3 hours to find out why converting to mesh wasn’t working, copying from the wrong object, one character change.
- Campbell spent an hour or so trying to work out why the smaller the pow(size, 0.0001), then pow(size, 0.0000000001) became more accurate. Turns out no multiplication was needed the rotation matrix has the scale already applied: pow(anything, 0.0)==1.0
- After considered discussion Campbell and Brecht were sure the artists didn’t have custom patches applied and it was save to refresh their builds, Brecht modifys the build script wiping Campbell’s build directory, documentation scripts and WIP patches, Later we discovered Nathan also had 2 uncommitted rig-generating scripts, Luckily he managed use some ninja undelete-fu to get them back.
- Campbell committed removal of most of blenders source code while attempting a merge.
- Brecht’s tiling/mipmap system compares file access times which the farm ignored, dancing textures!
- Campbell updated the RNA API for keyframe paths, forgot to search for function calls and totally broke keyframe insertion.
- Ton made custom keymaps override everything else and broke grease pencil
- Campbell wrote a multi-processing hair-sim generator to run overnight which managed to overwrite all the freshly generated data while trying to render result for review.
July 16th, 2010 at 6:29 am
those kind of cock ups are par for the course! well done on weathering them in good humour and not knocking each others lights out.(presumably)
July 16th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
This further is pushing me to learn the Blender source. Ton *did* say to me “we need coders.” and more watchful eyes, and more people to attack bugs (especially with Matt leaving full time bug squashing) certainly can’t hurt.
You should append a little bit at the end there like “Want to have just as much fun? Try these links to get started with Blender source!” lol
Secondly, to admit you’re wrong is bold. That deserves a donation. $$$
July 16th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
@ Juan Romero (Onnevan)
@ maddes
I totally agree also. Very simple posts like this
http://durian.blender.org/goodies/concept-art-dragons/
or this
http://durian.blender.org/production/render-gallery-update/
are just plain gold to look at!
The first minute might have been converted to more complicated issue to share if it has developed to reveal too much information – but at least more of these “dump stuff from our ‘weekly’ folders” (said in the latter link) would be more than welcome – in addition to these also great techy posts.
July 17th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Shit happens dudes, but the work you’re doing is awesome and very much appreciated. Keep up the good work guys.
July 20th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
in spite of these failures , Blender developers team had done great job
๐
July 20th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
LOL ๐
It happens me all the time, at least I’m not alone ๐
Cheers and very good post, we learn as much from failures than success
July 31st, 2010 at 5:21 pm
I understand how horrible all this is, even using 2.49b it was still hell trying to manage things and keep my mind on track and not want to turn my skin inside out.