Development news

[CARVALHO Luis Passos]

Hello everyone,

I am on a little break now so I thought I'd tell you what I've been up to. Free time, as you already know, is a scarce commodity in my life now, however I've not stopped working on kpovmodeler. It just goes much slower now.

Well, I've finally found and solved the stupid bug that kept crashing the library quite often, so now it's much better.

Also, I've been toying around with DCOP and have now a DCOP enabled kpovmodeler. It was so simple it was almost ridiculous. It open files and adds objects (shows a popup to get the position (first child, sibling, last child)where to insert the file, so it's not useful for now really, it was just a proof of concept).

What I'd like to know from y'all is what services would you like to see published in DCOP. Since it won't be in for KDE 3.2 we have a lot of time to get the API ready.

Don't worry as I'll keep priority on the object library. The DCOP services are just a side project to take my mind of some bug that may be blocking me so that I can get back at it with a clear head. It worked this time. ;)
I don't intend to put much effort on it before ending the library. It's just to get the ball rolling on getting some ideas.

What I know we'll need:
      new( )
	open( url )   		   which is done
	save( )
	saveAs( url )
	addObject( objecttype, place )   that needs the place parameter

	goToObject( objectpath )         select the object identified by objectpath [1]

Acting on the currently selected object:
	setProperty( propertyname, value )   
	getProperty( propertyname )
	up( )			// up one object
	down( )		// down one object
	expand( )		// open current object
	in( )			// enter current object
	out( )		// exit current object
	collapse( )		// close current object
	delete( )         // delete the current object
	
The renderer interface will have
	renderToFile( url )
		
Also functions to change the render options...

... and a bunch of animation oriented functions ;)

[1] objectpath, could be expressed, for instance, like this:
	/    				- the scene object
	/global settings		- the global settings object
	/camera			- the first camera on the scene
	/camera[5]			- the fifth camera on the scene
	/declare			- the first declare
	/declare{Gear}		- the declare named Gear
	/Gear				- like above
	/Gear/union/box[2]/translate	- the translate inside the second box of the first union inside the Gear

Opinions or suggestions are welcome,
Luis Passos Carvalho