Tinara / News: Recent posts

Development has proceeded rapidly since the recent design modifications and the changeover to Ruby as the primary language. Currently, multiple instances of Tinara's components (interface, core, and renderer) can be run across multiple machines via TCP sockets. The core loads a rendering tree from disk upon startup, and keeps the on-disk copy up-to-date with any changes to environments or objects.... read more

The Tinara project has again been reborn with a new design, a new language, and a new philosophy. This time, I truly believe that I will be able to release an alpha version within a couple of months.

Tinara's design has now made a fundamental departure from other "similar" systems. Tinara's rendering engine will not be intended to be run in a realtime context (e.g. as a JACK client). This does not mean that it cannot be run in realtime - it simply means that there will be slightly longer controller latencies (probably not enough to notice during typical usage).... read more

Although progress may be slow this month, much was accomplished during the month of September.

The most visible (or, rather, audible) change is that Tinara's Interface component now produces audio output. When the "Play" button in the Interface is pressed, two sawtooth waves are generated, and they are sent to the default stereo audio device. This continues until the Interface is closed, or until "Stop" is pressed.... read more

I spent over 25 cumulative hours last week coaxing SCons and wxWidgets to cooperate under Windows. Now that this goal has been reached, Tinara should be able (in most cases) to use exactly the same source code and build system without modification on both platforms.

I also revisited the ROADMAP file (in the docs/ directory of the `tinara' CVS module). I rewrote it from scratch, and I now feel that I have a fairly accurate reference for the amount of work required before an alpha release. As for a timeline, my current guess is roughly one year.... read more

I've continued to work through various details of Tinara's design. I am currently working on the cache system - one of Tinara's most significant features. As always, check the doc/ directory of CVS for the most up-to-date design info.

|)
|)enji

I've continued to refine the design. The first three chapters of the Implementation Guide now reflect something which I think is very close to the final design for the asynchronous distributed rendering infrastructure.

I hope to be coding again within a week, but I may not be able to write any actual Tinara code for a little while, since I'm planning to switch over to the SCons build system, and I'm also planning to move from GTK to wxWidgets. Both of these changes will benefit the cross-platform portability of the project, but it will take time for me to learn these new tools.... read more