Installation instructions

[oparisy]

I reckon that this extension does not do much by itself, but now that most of the networking protocol was described in #10 I'd like to write a sample application connecting to it.

So I tried to install this addon by copying the brte folder from the cloned repo to my Blender installation addons folder. It did not appear in Blender "Add-ons" user preference, though.

Can this addon be installed as-if? If so, could you provide some instructions in this regard? If not, what is missing (and provided, I suppose, by the BlenderPanda addon) to this plugin to be able to register to Blender and accept connections?

Regards, Olivier.

[Moguri]

brte does not register itself as a RenderEngine addon. It is mean to be subclassed and used as a basis for a an addon such as BlenderPanda. The debug folder contains a minimal example of such an addon. However, I haven't tested it in a while, and it may need to be updated.

[oparisy]

Since your comment, I tried the following:

1. upgrade my Blender install to respect the addon version constraint (>= 2.75),
2. copy the contents of the debug folder in a brte-debug subfolder of the addons folder of my install,
3. copy the brte folder in brte-debug,
4. replace from addon import DebugEngine by from .addon import DebugEngine

Following this "Render: RTE Debug" became available in the Testing category of the Add-ons dialog, as expected.

But when I tried to enable it, I got the following trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\modules\addon_utils.py", line 330, in enable
    mod = __import__(module_name)
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\addons\brte-debug\__init__.py", line 18, in <module>
    from .addon import DebugEngine
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\addons\brte-debug\addon.py", line 6, in <module>
    from .brte import engine
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\addons\brte-debug\brte\engine.py", line 29, in <module>
    from OpenGL.GL import *
ImportError: No module named 'OpenGL'

Should I install an OpenGL binding (PyOpenGL?) in Blender's embedded Python? How does the BlenderPanda addon (which as I understand it imports the brte folder verbatim from this repo, like I did) addresses this?

I hope to get this debug addon working so that I can fiddle with the underlying protocol without having to write an addon from scratch. I have some python experience, but do not know the Blender scripting ecosystem much, nor what I can expect from the embedded python runtime.

Regards, Olivier.

[Moguri]

brte relies PyOpenGL since Blender's bgl module was not sufficient for our needs. We're hoping that one day we wont need this (Blender 2.8 will introduce a new API, which sounds promising). BlenderPanda works around this by including PyOpenGL into its repo (see the OpenGL folder).

[oparisy]

I am modestly progressing, but got stuck trying to get the default DummyProcessor running.

I get the following error:

  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\addons\brte_debug\brte\engine.py", line 220, in gl_draw
    glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGB8, image_ref[0], image_ref[1], 0, image_format,
TypeError: 'CArgObject' object is not subscriptable

Indeed, DummyProcessor.update does return a CArgObject, which is then received by RealTimeEngine.view_draw in image_ref and accessed by subscripts as shown above.

Should DummyProcessor be adapted to RealTimeEngine needs? If so, what type of object should it return?

Regards, Olivier.