The sfd Beijing 's Organizer invited Blender to give a speech in the meeting.Thanks Ton and Blender Foundation sent us to present this activity.
Huanghai(deathblood) made this report in 20 minutes.The first ten minutes was show the ED movie to these listener,and last ten was an introduction to Blender.
more picture: http://picasaweb.google.com/yuzukyo/BlenderCN_sfd
the sfd’s link: http://sfd.beijinglug.org/indexen.php
Thanks Ton and Blender Foundation supported us to present this activity.
Though the targets were not familiar with CG,but they felt amazing about the Blender’s art works.
more picture: http://picasaweb.google.com/yuzukyo/BlenderCN_sfd
The official’s gallery: http://sfd.beijinglug.org/gallery/main.php
Yup, people all over the world are beginning to feel bad using pirated software, which is a good thing. Most of them can’t even afford to buy Carrara Basic. (You’ll wonder why 3ds max has the largest userbase.) I just can’t also help but wonder why not a lot are interested in contributing to Blender’s development. These countries are certainly not short on people who have excellent programming skills. India, Philippines, parts of Russia, etc. Three to five coders for every country will make Blender a mega 3d app in probably months instead of years.
Trust me, it’s not the amount of coding people available in each country that halts development of Blender.
Even though it’s getting better with the recent additions (since it went open source), there’s a lot of code in Blender that’s simply very hard to modify. Not because it’s difficult to understand in general, but mainly because pieces are scattered all around, put in one big file, many things are not documented by the original coder, a lot of code is duplicated across code files, many abbreviations are used (would you know that “cfra” stands for “current frame”, for example?) and most of the features are all hardcoded and very much not extensible at all. The fact that it’s mostly written in C only complicates it (I know Ton doesn’t like C++, but man… it could be so much more simplified, it’s not even funny anymore).
To put it simply: you’ll need a few weeks or longer (depending on your code and code reading/understanding skills) to get a grip on it, before you can actually start coding for real.
That’s a pretty big barrier for many people who just want to add some feature they need.
Anyway, great to see all these events happening in Beijing 
@oggsnoepje: thats sadly very true, as for being wrote in C… i don’t mind that, but i totally agree for a oss piece of software, good commenting is essential… 
as for the awesome Beijing Event… wish i could have been there! 
wow cool! looks like you had a great time!
yup, egree with @ndy, though i think you could have joined the two threads you made because they are basically about the same event! 
Well shouldn’t the current coders go in and put comments all over Blender’s current code, that might help bring better understanding of it.
Blender takes over China, hehe.
yuzupei: Thanks for showing this It’s too bad we don’t see that many chinese users or their work on this forum and the blendernation news site. I’ve run into quite a few very talented chinese artists on the web and I’m sure there’s a lot more out there whose work we simply don’t see.
Keep up the good work… I hope you had a great time 
Though comments would be nice, I also think source code should be self-explaining were possible.
Take the cfra-example from my previous post… a name like curr_frame would be much easier to get when you see it in code for managing a timeline. That’s documentation without the need to write documentation.
Same for other function names and variables. Here’s another one, try to guess what a “vd” is.
Hint: it’s got something to do with views. That’s one of the few hints you get when looking at the Blender source code. It’s not hard once you know, but there’s a lot of it.
Sorry for hijacking this topic by the way :o
The Chinese could become juggernauts of good art in the Blender much like how they’ve been increasing their haul of gold medals in the olympics.
Get enough Chinese developers and we could see a huge Chinese touch on Blender.
This topic came up in #blenderchat today, perhaps it would be a good idea for a coders’s only release, a 6 month development cycle just like for users, but for the developers to concentrate on their needs and wants and clean up the code. I believe this would benefit users as well, even if they don’t get a new version of Blender for a while. Honestly, the users can wait, if the code is a mess, then that should be a priority, the more accessible it is the more coders from all backgrounds would contribute, which would be a benefit to users in the end. After 2.50, maybe this is what needs to happen.
Mystery
Trust me, language is the main obstacle for chinese Blender artists.
I’m certain that hundreds people in china are interesting in Blender codes,but they lack a mentor who can speak chinese to organize them work work.
Here, here,
I am no coder, but that sounds like one of the most useful requests for future versions of blender that I have ever seen in these forums.
That way, many more programmers can just jump right in and get to programming what they want to rather than, sift through the code to find the hints on the code that relates to the projects they are wishing to contribute.
back on topic, I went through all your photographs and that looks like you did a great job on introducing people to the wonderful world of blender.
I would love to see more of the work coming out of china end up on these galleries too. Keep up the good work:yes: Friends from neighboring Japan!
im no coder but i agree with Mystery, a good, stable, optimized core, starts with well documented code… i dont need a shinny paint if the engine is old, rusty and fallen apart, if i want that i stick with max(heheheh)
things are well enough documented that a reasonably skilled coder can generally just dive in in most areas (although some variables would definitely do well with a bit more transparency), as to choosing C versus C++ or Java,
Linus Torvalds of the Linux Kernel fame expressed it well,
C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
He is being a bit hyperbolic, but it isn’t to far from the truth.
As to a ‘developers release’ things get cleaned up and improved with time as areas get refactored.
LetterRip
ahh, yes, now i remember, there were some “bug’s” in cpp itself, witch can create some problems, cant remember though, if they were just some contextual problems or something else…
All that goes for any language though, but that wasn’t really the point. Let’s not start another useless C vs C++ ‘discussion’. Each has it’s pro’s and con’s that have been both discussed and flamed to death.
The point was that the Blender source code can use an ‘upgrade’ to make it more accessible and more extensible. If that can be done with C, that would be great.
Is there likely to be any similar event in Southern China (Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Guangzhou)? 可能一样的在中国的南方（香港，深圳，还是广州）吗？
cfra is pretty obvious in context - an easy way to learn to read blender code is if you find something you don’t understand find its usage in python and read the doc for the function that uses it.
LetterRip