Let me share a quick update on what we’ve been up to for this month and where are we heading to.
After the release of Synfig Studio 1.0 our first priority is to update the official Synfig Training course to match all the features and changes of latest version. The course will be released in English and Russian. Other languages are “to be decided” and it is much depends on activity of our community.
Our goal is not just for updating the content of old course, but we are also taking this chance to extend its content with the new topics. And we are doing our best to make the new course as awesome as possible. For example, we would like to make sure that you will be able to watch the course even on the small screens. Below you can see a sample of the second lesson in Russian.
Let me remind, that everyone who purchased our course at Udemy platform, will get an updated version for free!
But what about the future of Synfig itself? Our main focus here is to work on optimization of rendering. The idea is to implement OpenGL-powered rendering engine, which should give a significant speed boost. Everyone want a real-time editing and playback, right? This is what Ivan Mahonin is working on.
This is really a big task involving a lot of internal code re-structurization. You can track his progress by following this branch – https://github.com/blackwarthog/synfig/commits/rendering(you might notice Ivan is mostly up for rare, but bold commits here).
Currently Ivan is finishing reorganization of current render engine, which will allow the OpenGL thing to fit nicely. Unfortunately, the code is still far from being usable, so those changes are not included into the main branch yet.
As it was mentioned, such optimization is a really big task, but I believe everyone will agree that the performance is the top problem of our software for this moment. We have to deal with it and we hope to change the situation for better. As usual, your support is much appreciated.