update release?

[rehdi93]

hey buddy, super happy that you liked my patch 😄 feels awesome for a learner like me.

but i noticed that you did not update the release in your repo, with my changes it's important to have the Scripts folder and the EXE on the same folder or the program won't work. I did draft a release on my fork as a 7z file w/ both of those things.

[isti115]

I am definitely planning on updating it. Some features are still in the works on my side, but after I made some modifications and tested it for a while I will package it up into a release!

[rehdi93]

Cool, I've also been working on my side as well, I want to add a config file to save stuff like paths, N# of processes, but I'm struggling a bit to find a method I understand 😐

[rehdi93]

Update

I DID find a way using the standard app.confg, see my "setting_file" fork

[isti115]

Man, the amount of things you are adding to this repository is huge! :)
I mean, that cool README that you have on your fork, the ability to manually pick blender and ffmpeg instead of using PATH, etc...

I'm starting to feel like this program is closer to being yours than being mine. If you are fine with that I could pull your changes, obviously credit you in the README and publish a release here as well.

[jendabek]

RedRaptor93: It looks like we are synchroniously working on the same things :) Can you please look to my modifications to your older version? I think there are some really important changes but I don't think it would be mergeable to your current source.
I noticed you added nice readme but you didnt commit any changes 15 days so I could not try to keep it in sync with you.
The most important changes in my version are:

• segments splitting is based on user-defined "chunk length" and all numeric inputs should be very fool-proof, there should never occur any non-sense settings (it automatically adapts to loaded .blend timeline etc.)
• rearanged UI to make it more simple and straightforward
• progressbar is displaying the progress by single frame accuraccy (by parsing Blender process output)
• when hitting "Stop", it kills rendering processes, thats the same case on app close
• mixdown audio now starts / ends as the video, it now auto-detects the file and is used by ffmpeg accordingly (it replaces original audio if mixdown exists)
• some confirmation dialogs (stopping render, overwriting already rendered chunks etc), status info etc.
• it works with relative paths, user doesnt have to care about what he set in Blender
• code refactoring, but I kept the basic functionality (which is the most important of course, I would take me forever to figure it out myself!) and your design.

Today I have finished storing the settings (created a class named AppSettings that cares about all the settings) and tommorow I will add configurable paths to executables. Then it will become really usable for everyone I believe!
But I am not sure what to do with it when we will have similarily functional 2 different versions? :) We can just let users to decide which one they want to use?
I don't think we would be able to re-use any of our code in the project of the other :(
Sorry, I thought you are not working too much because didnt see any commits last weeks :(

[rehdi93]

I'll take a look at it, I did something similar to your "chunck length" on my end... You seem to have some interesting work done, so have I... I'd be a shame to leave them separated. I didn't post commits last few weeks cause: A: I was super paranoid about the error checking for user defined paths. And B: Doing my Xamarin course, it's great, super good teacher, if a tad intimidating at times for some one like me I should have been more communicative, sorry 😖 but the last commit you did before I stepped in was in September, so I just assumed that you'd take some time to come up with a new version... Tomorrow I'll look at it, them we'll try and come up with a plan ⁣Enviado por BlueMail ​ Em 25 de fev de 2017 00:00, em 00:00, jendabek <notifications@github.com> escreveu:

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RedRaptor93: It looks like we are synchroniously working on the same things :) Can you please look to my modifications to your older version? I think there are some really important changes but I don't think it would be mergeable to your current source. I noticed you added nice readme but you didnt commit any changes 15 days so I could not try to keep it in sync with you. The most important changes in my version are: - segments are splitted by user selected "chunk length", all frames steppers should be very fool-proof and there should never occur any non-sense settings (it automatically adapts to loaded .blend timeline etc.) - rearanged UI to make it more simple and straightforward - progressbar is displaying the progress by single frame accuraccy (by parsing Blender process output) - stopping kills rendering processes, it stops them also on app close - mixdown audio now starts / ends as the video, it now auto-detects the file and is used by ffmpeg accordingly (it replaces original audio if mixdown exists) - some confirmation dialogs (stopping render, overwriting already rendered chunks etc) - it works with relative paths, user doesnt have to care about what he set in Blender - huge code refactoring (not done yet) Today I have finished storing the settings and tommorow I will have configurable paths to executables, then it will become quite usable. But I am not sure what now, when we will have similarily functional 2 different versions :) We can just let users to decide which one they want to use? I don't think we could try to merge our versions even partially :( Sorry, I thought you are not working too much because didnt see any commits last weeks :( -- You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #4 (comment)

[jendabek]

That Xamarin course could be very interesting, it is certainly nice tool to know :) I have never coded in C# before but I have some experience with Adobe AIR (ActionScript 3), which is some kind of multiplatform tool too. The language syntax is very similar to C#, fortunately! Still I struggle with some areas a lot so I think the author of this app should be noted as StackOverflow at the first place :)
No shame please! I think we will find a way how to get the best from both projects :)
Now I am working on startup detection of missing Blender & FFmpeg paths, test it properly and release it maybe as some beta / alpha / whatever version, is it ok? Of course names of you both will be included in that GitHub menu.

[isti115]

@RedRaptor93 You might be confusing something, because the first commit of @jendabek was on Feb 22, 2017. ;)

Anyway, I tried out your settings_file branch, and there seems to be some problem with empty paths being read and thus exceptions being thrown. I didn't have any time to tinker with it yet, so I have no idea what causes it, but if you could give me some clues I might be able to figure it out for the release.

The exception at expand.cs line 25:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.ArgumentException' occurred in mscorlib.dll

Additional information: The path is not of a legal form.

Upon inspecting I found that the exe variable contains an empty string that comes from MainForm.cs line 667:

reCheck(set.blender_path);

(My guess is that this could be because I didn't create any settings files, but in my opinion it should do it on it's own.)

[rehdi93]

On my tests, declaring values in hard code, I don't recall getting that exception...

The way I did the checking for invalid paths is, well... Sub-Optimum to say the least (I was at my wits end, frustrated, just wanted it to work god dammit 😠 ) I'll explain how I did it.

FindExePath checks Env. PATH or working dir. for the file EXE/path supplied, if it exists in either, it return the FULL path for that EXE, else it throws FileNotFoundException, however it would throw this even if the user defined path was correct... So:

reCheck(str) runs FindExePath for the the supplied string, if FileNotFoundException is thrown it checks AGAIN to see if the file it self exists. If the EXE is neither in Env. PATH or the added check fails, returns FALSE, else it returns TRUE

checkEXE() then runs reCheck(str) for both EXEs (blender and ffmpeg) and returns a string depending on the conditions of reCheck(str) ( if reCheck(set.blender_path) is true and reCheck(set.ffmpeg_path) is false, return FFMPEG_NOT_FOUND

FINALLY the following code checks the above string and points to errorMsgs to return the error and block the buttons if necessary (this code is present on MainForm_Load and DoReadBlenderData)

            //settings check
            var chk = checkEXE();
            if (chk == "FFMPEG_NOT_FOUND")
            {
                errorMsgs(-24);
                return;
            }
            else if ((chk == "BLENDER_NOT_FOUND") || (chk == "BOTH_NOT_FOUND"))
            {
                errorMsgs(-99);
                return;
            }
            else
            {
                // both execs found
                errorMsgs(0);
            }

So yea, kinda of a (total 😞 ) mess, right now I'm seeing ways to improve it, but we should find a way to merge our code first, otherwise if I go and try to fix it I might make the merge job even harder.

@isti115 I've used App.config for storing settings, but I don't know how to make the program check for a "first time run", if I did we could prompt the user to enter paths before using it.

[isti115]

Sadly I won't have much time to spend on this in the near future, so I made a release for v0.4 including the latest sources I could get to work for me. (Bumping one minor version for the additions of @RedRaptor93 and one for my modifications.)

ps.: Just one suggestion. Use enums for the error codes instead of numbers!

[rehdi93]

If @jendabek plans on keeping developing for this, and by the frequency he's committing it looks like he does, I'd gladly help him where I can.

I was planning on redoing my "settings_file" branch anyway, I would like to merge some of my changes to his project to see how it does.