On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 9:17 AM, Eugen Sares <sof...@mail.sprit.org> wrote: > While we are at it, out of interest: > could you elaborate a bit what the part of Softimage is that is married so > tightly to Windows? UI, event handling, whatever...? > Is Soft not laid out in a way so that higher functional levels sit atop > 'abstract' lower level ones, so you could make changes down there > comparatively easy?
that would have been nice, but there is no platform abstraction layer in XSI. The only bits of code that are cross platform are the ones that needed to work in a mental ray shader, and some odd bits from Softimage|3D. Every little thing in XSI is a COM object for example geometries, parameters, or fcurves. We did abstract things, in beautiful ways that allow everything to work with everything else and be browsed and built elegantly, but not the OS itself. The dev environment was assumed to be windows, and the programming model COM/OLE. The softimage source code is very high quality, but married to windows. For historical perspective, you need to know that we were owned by Microsoft in 1998, and there was no indication that SGI or the Mac would come back from the dead. The company began to consider the Film industry as "legacy" and that games would be the future. The product was named after the name of the game exchange format to subtly suggest that. Max also had taken the Windows NT jump, with huge success.
