On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:17 AM, Leendert A. Hartog <hirazib...@live.nl> wrote: > Well, there still is a marked difference between someone who is ill-informed > and makes an odd remark based on this and someone who actively > engages/believes in conspiracy theories. > Throwing the term "conspiracy theory" around in these kind of discussions > somehow might give the impression someone is thinking the other to be some > sort of nut-job. > And such confusion should be avoided, I guess...
Nice to trim the post, but let's reread what was posted before defending it as not conspiracy-like. "AD has always played politics with its upgrades, it's not about giving you the most efficient tools today, but releasing them in a slow staggered and incomplete fashion, so it takes several release and considerable investment before you actually get a functional addition to your workflow" It's heading towards conspiracy territory indeed. That it all could have been done years ago in one shot, but the company simply chose to not do it to get more money. This type of releases would be an encouraging sign of constant development for Modo or Houdini, or anyone else, including Softimage at Avid. We could cynically say Softimage always knew it had a particle problems from day one, but they knew users wouldn't jump to ship, so they waited as long as they could before doing anything. Then of course they were panicking with the loss of some clients and started to be "listening a lot" to uses all the sudden about it and made ICE. Why didn't they listen the 10 years before that? Particles didn't start being to be a problem in 2006! Or we could cynically say Softimage always could have support third party renderers (even talked about PRMan support at one point), but decided to only support Mental Ray, and a pipeline based on softimage's proprietary shaders, so that they could get people trapped into paying them for mental ray licenses. Politics! Then finally around V6 they decided to open up an API they "must have had all along internally" and declared they were listening and how "open" they were becoming! See, anyone can be cynical and make stuff up that sounds real. And anyone has the right to call you out on that. I could do this all day! Let's do more, just to fan the flames?? No? OK anyway! How about Softmage doing absolutely nothing in animation in the last 10 years probably because they were not losing any japanese subscription money over that! The last thing done was the Shape Manager, a project probably paid "by a big client". How about "turn edge"?? That was "touted a big feature" but it's a trivial thing game modellers have been asking since the days of Softimage|3D! How about user normals! That was a implemented as a plugin in the netview and it took 10 years before that was finally put in natively and then they "touted it as big feature" even though it "must been trivial" since they must have had "all the code already"! Etc.. etc.. etc.. It is the upmost cynicism to say that stuff like Bifrost or viewport enhancement is getting released incrementally to get more money. Every user of every package out there saying, give us more frequent updates, help us validate your features by seeing them and using them as they are being developed. There are monthly drops in the beta forums, and then if something is ready to go, it's released in an extension release to get it out there to a larger audience ASAP. Drawback, if you release things it adds more time to the development time because you have to clean some things up earlier. For example Softimage people worked between 2 and 3 years on ICE v1.0. Although it was probably impossible for that project, if they had made an intermediate release it might have added another year to the full V1.0. But the team did drop things like IK, applying ICE trees in branches and other stuff to make v1.0.
