Aqsis Developer Meeting - 20080127 (21:30 GMT)

What's been happening this week and the progress of last week's tasks.

1. Source outstanding information about incorporation - Paul Gregory
2. Replace old texturemap interfaces with new interfaces, and wrap the old classes in the new interface - Chris Foster
3. Implement the occlusion hierarchy refactor from B:BO - Paul Gregory
4. Update options and attributes section of the manual - Paul Gregory
5. Create basic web site example/frontpage - renderguy

Following the well received project Beaker, I would like to propose the introduction of a similar project structure for advanced features. The project will have similar qualification and approval processes, tailored to enhanced features, rather than performance improvements. The idea being to avoid adding new features that don't warrant the development effort.

Paul explained the proposal for a Beaker like project to encapsulate organised major feature enhancements. The purpose of the project is twofold. Firstly, to provide a mechanism by which proposed major enhancements can be designed and validated by the community as a whole, thus eliminating unnecessary or wasted development. And secondly, to provide a PR tool that when publicised properly will communicate the nature of the active development underway on Aqsis.

Chris feels that the structure of the documentation could be rearranged for maximum clarity, and has put a proposal for a new structure on the documentation index talk page. There has been some useful discussion of this on the mailing list, but we need to discuss this further to decide which changes should be made, if any.

There are two topics which would be good to address:

1. The logical structure, as seen by the user
   • The proposed layout: opinions on the breakdown into chapters and sections
   • Amount of content per documentation page
   • Which level of topic merits it's own page? (One page per section in a chapter?)
2. Technical issues:
   • Use of wiki namespaceses for logical structure (per-chapter?)
   • Policy for use of heading levels on individual pages, and how these relate to the printed documentation

Chris explained his proposal which is detailed on the discussion tab of the main documentation index page. He suggests that the documentation is split into three parts, a user focused section, a developer focused section, and tutorials and examples section. It is clear that not all of this content could be realistically completed before 1.4, so the suggestion is that the 3rd section is optional for this release. It was agreed that we need to formalise the way that the wiki markup, specifically sectioning, affects the PDF output, and once understood write some ground rules for writing wiki documentation that is intended to be converted to printable documentation.

The aqsistex library is coming along nicely in the texfiltering branch, and can now render most scenes containing coloured and greyscale textures. However, significant features remain to be implemented. These include

• Texture tiling and tile caching
• Shadow mapping
• Environment mapping

It might be a good idea to merge the texfiltering branch into the trunk sooner rather than later, so that the 1.4 release can proceed. Chris would like to gather some opinions on which features are considered necessary before a merge can happen, and which features should be upgraded to the new code before the next release of aqsis.

Note that the old shadow and environment mapping code will continue to work until it is replaced.

Chris explained the current status of the aqsistex library, as outlined above. It was agreed that there would be a benefit in merging the current work into the trunk sooner rather than later, so that it might be tested by users via the nightly builds.

The requirements for 1.4 release were discussed, and it was agreed that the implementation of texture tiling as a minimum was essential, due to the potential for very large textures, common with RenderMan renders.

1. Source outstanding information about incorporation - Paul Gregory
2. Implement the occlusion hierarchy refactor from B:BO - Paul Gregory
3. Update options and attributes section of the manual - Paul Gregory
4. Update documentation layout and structure according to the discussion page - Paul Gregory
5. Setup a wiki page outlining the rules for writing wiki documentation that is to be converted to printable form - Paul Gregory
6. Get high quality texture blur working - Chris Foster
7. Get shadow maps and PCF working - Chris Foster

The complete transcript of the meeting can be found here.