suggestion: automatic or more intuitive building

[MrMage750]

ok hear me out, I'm an aspiring game developer, though I have very little experience in crunching numbers, albeit only next to nothing, if I can't even figure out how to install any of these pre-requisites, then clearly no average joe could, all I want is to be able to use volume items in blender, this is WAY too many hoops to jump through just to use a single blender feature, I think openvdb needs to modernize with a reliable script to automatically build openvdb, or some other way to intuitively build this addon, because this is way too much work just to make a halfway decent gas cloud, which is what I'm doing here, note that mantaflow is broken beyond repair so afaik, volumes are the only working method of going about this

[MrMage750]

these discussions are as close to ghost town as can be without being completely dead, is there any other way to suggest things and report bugs for openvdb?

[Idclip]

Natively supporting a one-stop build script is always going to be extremely tricky - we heavily rely on the great work package maintainers do with things like apt/brew/vcpkg etc for users without too much toolchain experience to get up and running with OpenVDB. We're also continuously trying to refine our CMake and dependency requirements to make things easier.

The majority of the work on OpenVDB is contributed in people's own time - so whilst we try to be active here it helps if you're specific as possible. What exact problems did you run into? What OS are you on? What are you using to install dependencies? Was there any parts of the documentation that didn't work for you or you found to be incomplete?

[MrMage750]

"Natively supporting a one-stop build script is always going to be extremely tricky - we heavily rely on the great work package maintainers do with things like apt/brew/vcpkg etc for users without too much toolchain experience to get up and running with OpenVDB. We're also continuously trying to refine our CMake and dependency requirements to make things easier."

I couldn't imagine these work package maintainer's services would be affordable, let alone free. I'm not sure how old this addon is, but if you're working towards making this program accessible for average, middle or lower class joes, your progress is so little that it's not noticeable at all

"The majority of the work on OpenVDB is contributed in people's own time - so whilst we try to be active here it helps if you're specific as possible. What exact problems did you run into? What OS are you on? What are you using to install dependencies? Was there any parts of the documentation that didn't work for you or you found to be incomplete?"

none of these questions are relevant with how far I've gotten, I'm of above average IQ and I can't even figure out how to install so little as one of these dependencies, I think I'm better off looking for an addon that's prebuilt, even if it's price tag is exorbitant and borderline unaffordable like flipfluids, because as long as openvdb is gonna be impossible for anyone less intelligent than someone with a master's or doctorate's degree in computer science, I'm not getting anywhere closer to being able to run working smoke simulations