Synfig Project Forum

I read a question in a post about compositor Ramen being discontinued (Very sad news; http://blog.ramenfx.org/blog/2010/10/27/project-closed/comments/#comment101028-182547) about why there is not more cross usage of code between open source projects and that got me wondering as well. Why aren't there?

Synfig has a shortage of developers. Aren't there code around that can be used in Synfig? No need to do same work over and over if it already exists elsewhere.
Take sound layers as an example. Synfig needs them but no one has time to develop them. There are many open source projects out there that already have audio playback in it's timelines, couldn't Synfig reuse some of that code? There's Pencil and Blender to name just two.

Of course I realize that most of the code needed is Synfig specific and couldn't just be snagged from somewhere but if it's possible why not do it?

I also must point out that my programming skills is limited to a course in Pascal almost 15 years ago and some lua cut-and-paste...

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www.rylanderanimation.se
Synfig scripts, etc.

Hi rylleman,
it is sad read about an open source project being discontinued. Open Source projects are delicate criatures and not only a developer conforms its soul. It needs a user community and some other helpers around that seems has failed for the ramen project.

Regarding to the incorporation of new coders from other projets, we are and have been always opened to that. The problem is that usually it is not a question of knock on the door of a coder and ask for help. That could be useful for a short term but if the person who join the project is not fully excited with the project concept, he won't continue for long time.

The key is make Synfig attractive for the community because it offers a brillant and illusionant future.

Some time back, before and during release 0.62.00, I've been talking to Zelgadis several times. We were in a very bad situation: the vps of synfig.org was down lot of times, the website design was not good, the sourceforge migration was being very problematic... and also, I felt so lonely carrying lot of things on my back... He was also so busy those days with a personal stuff that kept him apart of the contributions. Plus this, I felt with lots of doubts for the future of Synfig because in the recent past we made some mistakes and I didn't want to commit other mistake again. So threre were a "lack of self confidence". I needed some sort of backing from the community to confirm the decisions we were going to assume but for that time there were so few people around.

But we stated one single thing: Don't look back others. Just look forward.

We decided to don't continously ask for agreement on every decision taken. If people is not happy with the current direction the Synfig project is taken, we were sure they will tell us. So we continue taking decisions.

Now we have a settled down website in a new reliable server (tuxfamily), we have a regular backup of the whole system in third computers so in case of breakage we can migrate all the system again easily, we have the wiki reorganized -even the seed of a offline book-, there is a promissing new CMS redesign of the site, we have a cron job updating the synfig api weekly, we have released another version of the program and even we have revamped the bones branch...

But even with this tiny sucesses there is a lot of work to do.

We still need to work a lot in the documentation in all the three aspects. Specially one thing that I feel that I'm the right person to organize due to my good knowledge of the program usage and my basic Synfig code overview: Code Roadmap.

To exactly know what's the things that Synfig needs to develop and in which order is the most important thing that we need to set down. Because this is a long task I want to start from the one that excites me more: the bones gui development.

Later I would like to continue writing something similar for the other needed aspects to fix (not in specific order): sound, render engine, gui, scripting, code documentation, etc.

It is true that I don't have enough time to do all this in the time that it should be done but anyone that come to join us in the code area should start by contribute on that long-term-and-not-short-term-satisfiying task of document the Synfig Code Roadmap.

-G

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Synfig needs your help!
Developers, packagers, bug testers, translators, artists, web developers, wiki writers... you can contribute!

Cross code pollination will be good.

GIMP animation package have some good code.

Have a look at Project Dogwaffle too.