I think the core issue here isn't as much whether Maya can be patched or not, it surely can, the core is still functional and respectably open, if not without issues (and stability has been degrading compared to the past IME).
The problem for a lot of people used to Soft is how much scavenging and patching they will HAVE TO do before they are even remotely close to having previous functionality. For the small scale Maya user, so leave us engineers and big shops out, having to scavenge for scripts and tools and hacking together horrible copy'n'paste MEL macros is part of the day to day routine, even for things such as opening more than one outliner. That's why it's perceived as inferior by a lot of Soft users. We can discuss potential all day, and there are certainly things I can do in Maya that Soft will simply not allow me to do, but in terms of OOTB experience it is pretty F'in disgraceful with all the missing bits. Rabbit's Shapes plugin and ngSkinTools are bare minimum additions to even be able to use it, along side a handful of shelves (Maya's layout is another disgrace that requires a lot of old school hacking) that you'll have to scavenge from all over the place. You also have to toe the line between what you can rely on and what you can't. Maya has a binary lock on versions, so any new major release, and in two recorded cases even the .5s, it breaks binary compatibility. Soft users take for granted that most C++ plugins and nodes written four years ago and never touched again will still work. There was some pretty major upset when for the first time a version or two ago some ICE fixes "broke" the majority of nodes into requiring recompilation. This is par for the course in Maya, compiled anything will NOT work on any major version other than the one it was compiled for. On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 6:36 AM, Meng-Yang Lu <ntmon...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've always felt Maya's core performance has been relatively good compared > to others. It is incredibly extensible and can maintain some really good > performance. The problem that Maya has is having the various components > exchange data between each other. Essentially, every node in the scene is > holding each other's hand always. These no easy way to hold up data to > prevent all the nodes from updating when you make a change. > > It boils down to how cleanly you can implement these features. There are > some legacy things that could go, obviously some complete reworks, but > development for Maya is a lot more straight forward than Softimage. > > My only gripe is that as you build tools for Maya, the plug-in manager > gets incredibly messy. Looks like a vomit of ideas over the past 10 years > and no search function. And it kinda needs all this garbage to function. > > House cleaning is definitely in order. > > -Lu > >
