On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 6:43 AM, Jordi Bares <[email protected]> wrote: > > Softimage, like SideEffect, 3DSMax and the rest are small teams of very > clever developers, 8-12 is the normal number of developers for any app... > that is a very small cost compared with the cost of advertising and PR, > believe me.
That's not quite right. That may be the number of people who interact with the community, but it certainly isn't the number of people necessary to develop and keep competitive Softimage, an app that's 12 millions lines of code. It's just OK to keep it on life support and make one or two feature a year. True for small apps like 3DCoat, but not for this one, not at this age. At Avid, we had those kinds of numbers ..*just in consulting* We had a lot more developers than that at the end at Avid, and that was after rounds and rounds of layoffs. We were down to one or zero person per area, not really able to anything but fixes and small features. You can keep that kind of app on life support/maintenance with a staff of 8-12, and that's totally true. But that's not the real problem. Look at what happens when you try to do a new project with a handful of "clever developers", the High Quality Viewport + Crowds in Softimage 2013. First, it's hit and miss whether it'll be any good; in this case, miss in the case of the viewport. Secondly, it's soaked up all the resources so you don't have anything else for the rest of the user base. A small of people can create a develop a new app and continue to maintain it, they are doing it all the time. A small group of developer will make a small app, and this app will probably be a lot more focused. This is not what we ended up with. Softimage is a gorgeous app, beautifully designed. But all is not well. The code base will be due for a large rewrite in a few years, like the QT port and viewport 2.0 in Maya. There are glass ceillings in playback performance/scalability that we've never been able to fix even after years of people looking at that. Mental Ray is about to fall into oblivion and if that needs to be pulled out of XSI, lots of stuff is going to go with it. Lots of fundamental things in XSI like scene file and scripting are based on Windows API that have been deprecated for a decade. There are new ideas and things coming up like OpenSubDiv, out-of-core-processing for FX, etc. You can also fetch one of those multi-volume mails from Matt about everything that's wrong in the product for his game artists. The animation toolset hasn't been updated since the shape manager. ICE Kine doesn't scale enough to replace it/ There is tons of work to do, even after 14 years.
