Working Computer in Blender
I got a few messages requesting this so here you go, it's insane but a bit of fun.
It's unstable but it works (sortof), I even hooked up the keyboard!
Go have fun, play doom, or qwop, or pretend to be your grandparent learning to use a computer for the first time.
There are instructions in the file, this has been tested on windows and mac in Blender 4+, while it "should" work in earlier versions it's untested.
I created this as a promo for my Tool Development Fundamentals book but as there was some interest in the technique I figured I'd share it.
This is a free file, You can do what you want with it, if you want to throw some change my way for coffee I appreciate it but don't feel any way pressured. I made this for fun.
Disclaimers:
I cannot guarantee this will be stable or work on all systems, if it fails to open or doesn't work at all, send me your details (Operating system, blender version) and any errors from the python console and I'll take a look when I can.
Try to run this in a portable version of Blender rather than an installation so it can download and install PySide6 (Qt) dependencies
This requires PySide6, if you don't already have it it will download and install it via pip. This can take a couple of minutes the first time you run it. Traditionally we'd bundle this via extensions to automate this but for now this works.
EDIT: I've been informed this auto install doesn't work on all systems, I will endeavor to address this in the future but in the meantime you can see a write up hereon installing packages.
CHANGELOG:
v2: I have changed the PySIde install portion to force installing to the site-packages directory, this should fix the install issue but you will likely need to run this on a portable version of Blender.
.blend and code