Any interest in eliminating the binary component?

[glynnc]

Given that makehuman is almost pure Python, is there any interest in eliminating the small number of C files?
I have a proof of concept, available at https://bitbucket.org/glynnc/makehuman/src
It has been lightly tested with 1.0 alpha 6 and the current subversion trunk, on Linux and Windows, and seems to basically work. It requires PyOpenGL, NumPy and PIL. SDL was replaced with GLUT (mainly because PyOpenGL already includes GLUT bindings and PySDL appears to be orphaned).

[Manuel]

Check your email

[duststorm]

Very interesting. I'm trying it out now.
There's only one thing I'm worried about a bit, and that is whether it will still have enough performance.
We were discussing whether we could delegate some more computational tasks to C code to make the GUI more responsive.

Pure python does have a lot of advantages too.

[duststorm]

I tried it but received a segmentation fault (on linux).
Have you tested it on linux too, or is it a windows-only demo for now?

To make sure I did it correctly: I first extracted a stable alpha 6 archive in a folder, then I copied the files from your repo in that folder,
so that makehuman.py is in the same folder as the makehuman executable. Then I ran makehuman.py.

[mflerackers]

I guess PySDL has been replaced by pygame (www.pygame.org) and pyglet (http://www.pyglet.org).

[robertltux]

my only concern is situations where folks have multiple versions of Python installed what happens then??

on a side note as part of sorting out why Custom Eye Support seems to be broken how could i get some sort of debug console going?? I have tried to run the makehuman.pyd file but it has some sort of encoding problem.

[glynnc]

I tried it but received a segmentation fault (on linux).
Have you tested it on linux too, or is it a windows-only demo for now?

I tested the subversion trunk on Windows and Linux and 1.0a6 on Windows.

[glynnc]

There's only one thing I'm worried about a bit, and that is whether it will still have enough performance.

That depends upon the number of meshes and the overhead per mesh. The size of each mesh shouldn't affect the C-versus-Python balance; glVertexPointer() etc doesn't care about the size of the array (unless it's being converted, but that would also affect C performance).
The per-mesh overhead can be reduced somewhat (at the expense of compatibility) by using features of later OpenGL versions, e.g. VAOs and uniform buffer blocks, or by pushing more of the work onto the shader.

[glynnc]

my only concern is situations where folks have multiple versions of Python installed what happens then??

Multiple installations shouldn't interfere with each other. A batch file could be used to select a specific Python installation.

on a side note as part of sorting out why Custom Eye Support seems to be broken how could i get some sort of debug console going?? I have tried to run the makehuman.pyd file but it has some sort of encoding problem.

Running it from IDLE works for me (Python 2.7.2, 32-bit, on Windows 7, 64-bit).
makehuman.py is a trivial script; it just appends the "lib" subdirectory to sys.path, redirects stdout/stderr to files, then execfile()s main.py. If you add sys.path.append("./lib") to main.py (or move the files from lib to core), you should be able to run main.py directly.