Regarding Synfig's Release
Monday, October 24, 2005 by darcoPosted in Technology, Synfig
So here's the story. While I'm not quite fully settled down here in Menlo Park yet, I am starting to try to get back in sync with my responsibilities outside of work and such—that being my clients and those who are looking forward to Synfig.
I mentioned that I will be releasing Synfig by the end of the month, and I intend to do so—as a “developer preview”. What this means is that I don't expect everyone to be able to download the binary builds, start fiddling around, and making great things. This software was originally designed to be used in-house, which means that we skipped out on a lot of the polish and instead of spending time re-writing unclear parts of the user interface we just dealt with it. Synfig is, in its current state, rather intimidating for newbies. I hope to improve this in time.
The real purpose of this release is to try to recruit developers. Now that I am working a full-time job at Crystal Dynamics, I will not have much time to devote to working on Synfig. The hope is that I can hook some talented developers into helping out.
All that said and done, I hope to have the following available when I release:
- MacOS X Build (using GTK via X11 at the moment)
- Windows2000/XP Build
- Source Code (if you are using linux, you will have to build it)
Make no mistake, this is a powerful software package but it has a LOT of rough edges.
DO NOT expect to use this software in a production environment right now. It will be buggy. While at Voria we used this software in production, the guys who wrote it sat behind the animators who were using it. You won't have this luxury. 
DO expect it to improve dramaticly over the next few months. Rough edges are just that. I don't anticipate smoothing them out to be that big of a deal.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Great to hear and glad you're finally getting somewhat settled. Can't wait to try out the developer preview.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
When we get the developer's preview, will the community be able to make tutorials and post them to your site for others to learn from and use?
Also, will these be a forum to discuss issues with each other?
AWBenson
Thursday, October 27, 2005
That\'s the plan. I may not have it all set up initially, but there will be a Wiki and a mailing list. Perhaps a jabber chat room as well. I hope to set that up this weekend.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Hey darco, does Synfig have a built in lip-sync or will there be an option to import lip-sync scripts?
I already made a lip-sync program (that's still needs improvment) that exports scripts for flash. You can check it out on my website, http://www.flashpulse.com/
Thursday, October 27, 2005
No, there is not a lip-sync mechanism inside of Synfig. However, we did add the ability to view audio waveforms on the timeline and scrub audio, but I don't believe it is working properly across all platforms at this time.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
That sounds like that should be good enough for lip-syncing but I'll have to wait and see. Also, the anti-aliasing looks great in Synfig. From what I've seen on your site.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
What's going on Sir Quattlebaum. I've been checking on your progress over the years every once in awhile(I believe Martha Barton has as well for she's the one that first told me about your synfig project years ago) and I must say I'm impressed. You've come along way from making a kick ass side scrolling gem gathering game to making this elaborate piece of software(Which I watched the convention video for and it's very impressive). I downloaded the old source so I'll probably finally get around to compiling and checking it out in the next few weeks. By the way, I'm assuming you haven't forgotten me from Lowndes. I did annoy the hell out of you for about 2 years in the techlab afterall.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Oh dear, that source is ancient. It has been totally re-written since then. I'd just wait until this weekend. You will be much happier.
Regarding anti-aliasing... Yes, it looks great, largely due to the second generation polygon rasterizer that my former business partner (Adrian Bentley) wrote. Another reason the antialiasing looks good is because colors are mixed in a physically linear fashion (ie: mixing gamma of 1.0) rather than at the screen gamma.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Wow, a lot of stuff over my head there, but in case you come back to this post Rob (Bryant) expect to have troubles with that source you downloaded if its the one I think it is. It's an impressive little command line fractal program though and is worth checking out. If I remember right, the other Rob (darco) told me to do something in a header file to fix the compiler problems, after that it compiled and worked smoothly though.
As for the current project, also named Synfig, it is even more impressive. I've had a chance to watch it work. The only thing that I'd like to see added is more real time rendering, although I'm assuming that the Mac version (which is the one I've seen) is a bit slower due to not being optimized. Voria did use the software on Intel/Linux boxes after all. Who knows, in another year perhaps I'll be a capable enough programmer to dabble in the code a bit and help optimize some things for the PowerPC.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Well darco, sounds like you were busy or ran into an issue? What's the news update now? Hope all is alright.
Monday, October 31, 2005
I'm just making sure everything works before I upload it. Mostly polishing the build system, making sure “make distcheck” works correctly, etc... It may be late tonight, but it will be tonight.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Glad to hear all is well. Hope you had a good halloween. That is if you celebrate it. Cheers!
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
Is there some sort of post-fx filter mechanism in Synfig, like based on GIMP's gluas? it would be awesome to have the ability to share Lua scripts like what's coming with Dogwaffle, to perform post fx across the time line, frame by frame.
come to think of it, it just would be awesome to have a vector capability in Dogwaffle. Perhaps there's a way now to plug the two together?