A few updates

Discussions that concern the community rather than the makehuman software

A few updates

Postby joepal » Thu Apr 06, 2017 8:57 am

I guess it might be hard to see what's happening on the dev side in MakeHuman, since large parts of the discussion is between devs. So I'll just describe some of the things we're working on/with atm:

Python 3
Rob Baer started playing around with a python 3 port in the fall, and the last few months this has gotten serious, to the point where we now have a build which actually starts. Python 2.7 is approaching end of life so this would soonish start to become necessary anyway. We're messing around with different repos, but atm it looks as if we'll end up using https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman for the development. The python 3 builds can be found at http://download.tuxfamily.org/makehuman/nightly/ as and when we make them (I haven't yet started doing actual nightly builds)

Supporting PySide / moving to Qt5
Riverside computing has dropped support for PyQt4, and removed all binaries from the download areas. As this was a core dependency for MH, it has prompted us to start the process for replacing it. The current solution is to support both PySide (which is another open source Qt wrapper) and PyQt4 at the same time, and have MH pick the one which is installed when drawing the UI. However, PySide is largely deprecated too, as is Qt4. In the longer run we will have to move to Qt5.

Refocusing "MakeHuman" into "MakeHuman Community"
As is apparent to anyone who has been following these forums, MH has grown to be something larger than just the piece of software you install once. With the advent of the asset repos and the community plugins, the concept of "MakeHuman" has been a bit outgrown. In the future, we're planning to build on the whole context and spend some effort on making it easy to get and use third part assets and extensions. In practical terms this means:

  • Future releases of MH will bundle plugins which are not core parts of what has so far been called MakeHuman. Notably this includes the asset downloader plugin and MHX2. But we assume there will be other interesting plugins too.
  • Development effort will be spent on making it easy to write plugins for MH. Examples might include the camera plugin discussed on the forums already, or new file format exports. Or whatever MH users think interesting enough to write a plugin for. The hope here is that we can encourage the same user involvement in plugins as we have got with the asset repos. You can find most of the existing extra plugins here: https://github.com/makehumancommunity (look for community-plugins-* repos).
  • Some of the functionality that is now part of the MakeHuman source code will be modularized into separate plugin projects in order to make it easier to build on and extend them. These will end up on github too.

Cleaning up some repos
During our experimentation, the flora of code/asset repositories have grown somewhat wild. We thus plan to deprecate and remove some things. The following are slated for change/deletion:


The immediate future
Anyway, the most practically visible consequence of the above, is that "soon™", you will start to see python3-based zip files called "makehuman-community....zip" with bundled plugins and some extra assets appear in the nightly folder on tuxfamily. (the "makehuman-python3" build there right now doesn't bundle anything extra, it's just a proof of concept that we can get through the whole build process).
Joel Palmius (LinkedIn)
MakeHuman Infrastructure Manager
http://www.palmius.com/joel
joepal
 
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