On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Jed Frechette <jedfreche...@gmail.com> wrote: > FWIW, I see 3D content creation as a fundamentally high-end endeavor. > Being able to start learning Blender on low-end systems is great. However, > I want Blender to be taken seriously as a professional tool, not just > something you play with until you are able to afford "real" hardware and > software.
That sounds like a rather narrow view. Wouldn't this be like telling musicians that they _can't_ make a career unless they sign up with some major recording label that has "real" resources (that then takes 90% of the artists' money). It is a good thing those people that wrote that software for commodity hardware that does much of what costly recording studios used to only do didn't think this way. Or maybe start charging $500 for blender to filter out all those pesky users that can't afford (or prefer not to waste that much money on) $2000 "real" systems. This must be the Maya philosophy, given the [are you &$^* kidding me] US$3675 price tag (it probably requires $10,000 hardware minimum). > If development is being held back by attempting to support old hardware > and OS versions and no one is willing to step up and support those bits > then their use should be depreciated.I would much rather see the limited > developer hours available put towards moving Blender forward rather than > attempting to maintain compatibility with an ever increasing list of > legacy hardware and OS versions. And if the product _only_ caters to the rich (or "professionals" that write it off as an expense) and significantly limit its target audience, then interest in development will drop (the nature of OSS). It seems part of the issue here is all these generic statements that blender should drop support for X and Y, but not many specifics on what "development effort" it would actually unhinder (OpenGL is maybe the only one that has had some specific reasons mentioned [I think]). For example, "Drop XP".. Ok, if support for just XP was dropped, what would be different? I mean if I was to go out and buy some $5000 top-of-the-line system and then install XP on it (assuming the drivers all worked fine), then what about this machine would be harder to support in blender? Similar vagueness goes with RAM.. the suggested new minimum is 2G. I assume this is what the machine has total, not what is available to blender after the OS, any background apps/processes (and what if one runs a Windows VM on their linux box?). So how much memory does blender typically "get" after overhead on a 2G system running XP, how about Vista, Win7, Win8, or Linux? Each newer OS version tends to use more memory that prior ones for itself.. so requiring a new OS is likely to artificially "require" more system memory to let blender do the same thing. So maybe the better thing to do would be state what specific developmental/runtime requirements will be minimally supported instead of what some assumed hardware/OS, that may or may not meet those true requirements, when blender is executed on a user's system. This goes back to my previously stated principle of "don't assume just because a system _has_ resource X that application Y will get that due to user's choices of how that system is used overall" (give or take however I originally phrased it). Oh, and when the minimums do change.. would it be better to do it on major 2.x lines? So we don't have users going "Feature X in 2.67 is great (despite the crashes).. I can't wait for the stabilized form in 2.68, the next minor release. What? I can't run 2.6x anymore _with_ a stable feature X?!" -Chad _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers