From the user's point of view, the most important thing abt. plugins is a standardized interface and tight integration into blender UI. The best example I know is MAX, where plugins simply appear as additional buttons. The thing is, max was developed from the very beginning with that "feature" in mind, whereas blender might need some GUI modifications.

blender dosen't even have the neccesary plugin/scripting api to do everything we want it to do. We'd need to make blender's architechture allow us to do things like rendering and real mesh editing and such before we could make a real inteface for acccessing such functions, right?

-Jon

Acctually I diasgree with you, MrMunkily.

Comeing up with a good system now, means we won't have two independant types of plugins that end up needing to be presented in totally different way...

Once we have an interface, then any new development on the plugin API should try to fit that interface.

If Blender had NO plugin API, then I'd say you're right. But making an interface to make it easy to your the plugins is a good tool _even if_ you can only do the things you can do now.

What we should see is:
Python - Access to all object types.
Plugins - Post-Processing Plugin (can do ZBlur, or Glow on stills w/o going to sequence editor),
- Volumetric Texture plugin system (calls a texture plugin at a specified interval along the eye vector when inside the bounding mesh)
- Mesh Plugin (Define new 'primitives' - Could be done in Python if made easy to use)
(Don't know if this belongs here, but) A better library system, so whole objects (including textures and children) and be imported from a lib AND exported to a lib.

Note: most of these can be worked on independantlu, as long as a basic structure is followed.

Bob

sirdude's working on it - but I think that he sould add categories like this

'Primitive' Plugin
Mesh-Edit Plugin
Import / export (compiled) plugin
sequence plugin
texture plugin
'render' plugin
physics plugin (probably better done by scripts for simple things, but a compiled plugin will be essential for uber-intensive things like hair)
codec plugin
game shader plugin (to import opengl per-pixel shaders into the game engine? possible?)
material shader plugin for the renderer

(I couldn't see an obvious correct place for this question, but since we seem to be on the topic of plugins...)

I've just encountered a problem with Blender 2.25: ye old ZBlur plugin doesn't seem to work. It works fine with older versions, eg 2.22 and 2.23, but I get

Code:

"Error: input has no z-buffer"

. I compiled the plugin on Linux against the 2.25 plugin includes dir using bmake. The error stems from the fact that the input strip struct (in the code) has a null or zero

Code:

zbuf

field. The rendering result is a solid red image, indicating error.

Anyone know if there is a different API for sequence strips?

/Dave[/code]