New entry and state-of-art development

Compilation and Development
1

Hello everybody,

I am a new entry and I love 2D (traditional and computer) animation. My first animation software was Autodesk Animator Pro (it ran on MS DOS), today open source.

I would like to study the Pencil code, in order to collaborate and improve it.

The problem is that I don’t know its software architecture. I don’t know if somewhere there is a mind map or a graph describing the general software structure.

I see that the code lacks comment lines. I think that the more commented the source code is, the more described algorithms underlying get clearer. I am going to analyse the code and then I will ask for your feedback.

Thanks

Tiber

2

Welcome here, @tiber !

Our lead developer is @chchwy, he’s probably the one who could help you if you manage to get it touch with him (not always easy).
As you might have seen, we’ve got a Pencil2D repo on Github…

Any help/improvement is welcome on the code !

3

Thanks, gordie !
Now I see … I had downloaded an old version of Pencil source code.
Now I’ve got the last one.
It seems to me better and more readable than the former.
Let’s see how it’s made of.
Hey, but … is everyone on summer holidays ? Forums are desert …

4

It seems that they are. I think chchwy has abandoned this project already. I’m honestly thinking about forking it or attempting to improve the project myself, although I’m not a particularly advanced coder. The internet doesn’t seem to care about having a good open source animation program, for some reason - perhaps the remnants of the pencil2d community can fix that.

5

Actually, I take that part about him abandoning it back - I just realized that he last updated the source on June 30th. I’m not sure why he hasn’t updated the binaries in so long, or why he hasn’t been in the community (afaik) lately

6

Welcome @tiber, hopefully you can assist us in improving Pencil 2D. I downloaded the source as well but I didn’t find a map either, and I’m not a programmer, so I can’t assist you with that. Now, we know Mark has been a bit silent, but that doesn’t mean he’s not here.

I’ll be blunt, we NEED people to work on the programming, but going solo ain’t helping nobody. Nick @spark, if you have friends or yourself want and can contribute to the code, please DO.

Mark obviously has a life, as we all, but he still updates stuff over the repo at GitHub. You guys should join the newsletter to get those updates. Mark reviewed and closed a bug report 3 days ago. So he IS working on Pencil. And he isn’t the only one. There’sactually 14 registered contributors.

I too try to check the forum from time to time, but I am busy as hell. So I can’t sit 1 month straight to analyze the code and help with that, much to my regret. What I want to help with though, is with real-life tutorials. Not those fake “we have sound on pencil with magical ffmpeg build” tuts. But actually stuff that helps you work with it as an animator. I’m working silently on that, because I don’t want to make any kind of promise just yet.

We all have experienced annoying bugs, crashes and god knows what else with the software. But noone seems to want to help much, they only come and say “oh shit pencil aint still half-baked, cya in 2 years”. That’s not how it works, I mean if we had the manpower of Blender, or even Krita, this software would be on version 5 already.

Anyway, let’s be mindful that we NEED to colaborate on this together, or Pencil won’t lift off. If any of you have ideas, go to the IRC, post it on the forums make buzz and fuzz about it on every page that Gordie @admin put on for us (they are on the right hand side of the webpage under “bookmarks”)

Thanks for taking an interest in helping out and don’t despair, things will work out if we help each other. Peace.

7

Really great post, Jose Moreno @morr ! Can’t agree more.

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Also agreed! I will do my best to help with development and also to spread the word. I need 2D animation software, and I’m sure there are a bunch of other people who have the ambition and not the money to buy flash! Pencil2D is our best hope!

9

For our New Users who want to help Matt and this small digital community to develop Pencil2D as a fine stable software for animation, thank you all.

I just want to say it loud: It is my own opinion that despite the new comments of New Users wanting to help the development of Pencil2D, we all must have very clear in our minds that it will not always be possible for them to come here and do what they want to do in the first place. What I mean is that I deeply know that not always it will be possible to come here and help as intended, But most of the time that behaviour will end up with just comments here and there offering help but nothing more than just comments :frowning:

By now the only person developing Pencil2D (besides two/three other ones who are doing a great effort trying to keep it alive) is Matt… but to be honest with all of you, if I were him I would probably be frustrated by the lack of dedication showed on the past by those who decided to help directly on the development of Pencil2D, but left for good

I just want to say this for the sake of clarity
Have you all a great, Great day!

[no offence intended]

10

You’re right @kaiko,

there is always the risk to meet people in forums that first introduce himself/herself, join some threads and then … suddenly and mysteriously disappear. Or make promises over their real competences.
I guess it’s already happened so many times here, too.

The new user(s) ? It’s just me, of course.
Well, instead of lurking these forums for weeks, I’ve preferred to communicate with you, in order to have a first feedback by you.
I have some experience with Java (Eclipse IDE) and Fortran and some scripting languages, though I am not a professional developer.
In my life I studied engineering and now I am a physics teacher in a public school. Next week I will be on holydays, so I won’t post more (unuseless ?) comments here. When I come back home, as I said, I will study the code before proposing/promising any changes or improvements.
One thing it will sure … I won’t do all by myself.
Even if there are only two people developping Pencil in this period, it ought to be a collaborative team activity anyway.

Best regards
tiber

11

By the way, some sketches of some (original) characters of mine.

http://web.mclink.it/MF4683/Html/rovil.htm

I would like one day animate them, especially the Middle Age group.

12

@tiber ,

You happen to be a new user here but I was not talking about you (I believe there are some more new users who have actually offered some help lately, like you did), I was making no assumption about yourself :), I was talking globally of course.

We are happy to have you here, sincerely, and I believe Matt will need every help from people who trust this software as much as he does.

I myself come and go here to check any news, and since there is a bit increase of activity around this forum, I am just rejoicing the whole thing.

Thank you for your concern!

13

I like how the Monk looks like
:slight_smile: