Konstantin's weekly report #50

Development Development reports
1

Hello, everyone!

Let me summarize the achievements of the last week.

1. Gtk3 port. We have fixed several issues in Gtk3 port of Synfig and it seems to be ready for daily usage. At least, for the moment I am not aware of any regressions comparing to Gtk2 version. Of course, there is always a risk to have some hidden issues, so I put much hopes that our users will give it much better proof testing as son as we have testing builds ready. Until then I will continue testing it with my current real-world projects.

2. Bone Distortion improvements. The Bone Distortion layer now allows to set the distortion area and mesh resolution. Check out this demonstration video - youtu.be/T1gCUWW6ELY

3. Rendering speedup. Last week Ivan have finished reworking of tile rendering algorithm. It eleminates the creation of redundant tiles and makes one-pass rendering. While for general case the speedup is not significant, there is a significant impact for Blur and Distortion layers (with high distortion/scale values) and 200%-500% speed boost for mesh-based distortions. At the moment Synfig have only one mesh-based distortion layer (Bone Distortion), but in the future it’s quite possible that all other distortion layers will be converted to mesh-based, which in turn opens a possibility for implementing further hardware optimizations.

4. Link to Splines issues. Fixed an important regression, which was preventing linking groups to Splines (bug #596). But the bug #595 is still ending to fix.

5. Units in the Tool Option Panel. Yu Chen made a fix, which makes Tool Options Panel display system units for its parameter values.
ui5.png
Source code with all mentioned changes is available in repository here - github.com/morevnaproject/synfig/commits/gtk3

It’s been almost a year since we hired a full-time deveoper Ivan Mahonin to work on Synfig. Lots of things changed for those 11 and half months - you can see the most of implemented features at out YouTube channel - youtube.com/user/SynfigOfficial

This weekly report marks the end of Ivan’s commitment to Synfig for this month. I am not sure that we will have enough funds to hire Ivan in August, but it is quite possible we might have something in September. In any case, your donations are appreciated as always. :slight_smile:

Meanwhile Ivan is out of business, I will try to finish wrapping up all the latest improvements and deliver them to our users with the new development snapshots. Also, I feel the stable version is slowly shaping up and we’re getting closer to releasing Synfig 1.0. Let’s see how this will turn out…

2

Hi K,

Thanks for your awesome job.

Which repository will be used for gtk3 development in coming days? Do we plan to stop gtk2 development immediately?

3

For now the developing repository will be “morevnaproject/gtk3”. But as soon as I will get the packaging problems sorted out, the changes will be merged into official “synfig/master”. I hope to get that sooner, but there are a lot of problems with Linux build scripts, because we have a lot of changes related with dependent libraries. In fact, the Linux packaging system got a total rewrite because of that. :slight_smile:
And yes, I see no reason to continue gtk2 development,

4

Good, So I’ve be better to not touch linux build script till you push a new one. (I removed cvs and added mlt+ the script a little bit this days.)

5

Fantastic work!
I would love have seen the horizontal and vertical subdivision parameters in action, to see the performance effect.
-G

6

Surprise, the performance impact is not significant. Rendering time keeps almost the same with 32x32 and 5x5. :slight_smile:

7

There’s something wrong with the wiki:
wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Doc:Overview

snapshot17.png
snapshot17.png704×381 106 KB

8
9

Is development stopped ? :unamused:

10

It’s still summer…

11

In May 2014 we have run the fundraising campaign to cover the costs of full-time development for the whole summer - indiegogo.com/projects/synf … n-software
Unfortunately, we haven’t collected enough money to cover whole 3 months, so on 15th of July our full-time developer Ivan Mahonin have left the project for an unknown period. As a consequence, the development turned to much slower rates since then.

Currently I am working to correctly package all latest improvements (Gtk3, Sound Layer and optimized renderer) to all supported available system. So we will be able to provide testing packages for our users. There are also other things in the works, so stay tuned. :slight_smile:

12

Hello, Konstantin, Thanks for your job. On my linux platform, The branch gtk3 from your (morevnaproject) is not stable to work with, I can not even draw a outline correctly, the program always crashes. I am not sure if is only my case, which platform are you using to work on currently? Is gtk3 stable enough to use?

Btw, it might be worth to have an update by posting the above you said in main web site.

13

Hello, Yu! This is really weird. I am using Gtk3 branch here in our production and it works fine. The only issues that I hit recently is that waypoints aren’t displayed while drawing and also the crash happens when I’m switching to Graphs Panel (I am not sure about conditions to reproduce that yet).
I am using Fedora 20 (64bit).
The usual advice: please make sure that your build tree is clean and try make a full rebuild. :slight_smile:

Good idea!

14

Woops, looks like I’ve got a lot of news pushed into queue already, so such announcement looses its purpose. Anyway, I think it’s for better. :slight_smile:

15

Rebuild in clean tree get the same result on Archlinux. But I’ve installed a fedora20 copy, Synfig Studio Gtk3 branch is much stable. Sorry I can’t figure out the reason why it crashes all the time on Archlinux.

16

Well, Archlinux isn’t much stable itself. :slight_smile: Anyway, this is aren’t a good sign indeed.

17

Great, thanks a lot!
I spotted in current stable (0.64.1) the fact it still uses ffmpeg in a few render scenarios, while the libav library has changed in the last year. ffmpeg no longer exists and avconv should be used instead. This was mentionned in an old bug report too. If you could do something about it for the next stable release that would be great!

18

Hello, Berteh!
Yes, that’s important. I have added that to my queue. :slight_smile: