On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Chad Fraleigh <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Jed Frechette <[email protected]> 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).
The intention from blender devs isn't to be elitist, you may choose to see it that way but I think its a stretch. Just to say that since I've been using blender, its been able to run fine on sub $500 system quite well, I doubt this will change even with suggested updates to the minimum system spec. >> 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). Memory requirements exist weather they are apart of our minimum-spec or not, exact details depend on many things out of our control. System specs are typically quite arbitrary - Of course a poorly configured system may fail, or a below-spec system may work well with a tweaked configuration. The system requirement for memory are mostly to manage user expectations --- that they will be able to use blenders entire feature-set, follow tutorials - etc, without having to do tricks with swap space or reduce undo memory limit (for eg). > 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 > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers -- - Campbell _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
