Nobody said its perfect, I am fully aware Softimage needs some truly major work done to keep it well into the 21st century, like Max and Maya and every other app, agreed.
Regarding the number, you know we users are in the dark, everybody avoids answering that but from what I heard (and may be wrong) the development team never has been big, it is a different thing all the support, Q&A, documentation, etc… that is the bulk of the company. Regarding the point I was trying to make, are you saying the cost of development of Softimage was costlier than the PR, advertising, support, documentation, etc..? Its very sad LucEric… very very sad. Jordi Bares [email protected] On 8 Mar 2014, at 13:29, Luc-Eric Rousseau <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
