On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 5:41 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > if anything it shows that bridges between software can be made and that there > is added value in combining platforms. > > as opposed to ditching them. > > now imagine one vendor having both the 3d applications and the procedural > environment under its own roof, with access to the development teams and > source code. > making such a bridge should be much easier. > > but that would require some forward thinking. > this spring it’s getting obviously clear at which companies the forward > thinking is / is not happening.
I think you're still in flame-the-autodesk-guy mode, peter, but I thought I'd reply to your first post in this thread with some more hopefully useful background. Turning ICE into an engine, or deeply integrating Softimage into something like Maya has been discussed for years. But there are many reason why this would be a nightmare to deal with for all users, and none of us developers would want to deal with that monster. Softimage is huge, like 12 millions line of code huge, 100% dependant on Windows API and obsolete stuff like OLE compound files (for all persistance), VBScript and countless other windows dependancies. It's literally a code base with an expiration date, especially on Linux where we're depending on a third party with an NT4 source code license to get things to work. Now imagine installing a plug in to maya with 300 dlls and few thousands other files, plus MainWin, just to do some procedural thing. Absolutely ridiculous - and a pain to move that forward. (ICE is unfortunately not separable from the rest of the XSI architecture, even though everyone knew they ultimately wanted to have that stuff running in a game engine.) So the solution obviously is to do a clean implementation that is platform- and app- independent and that's what we were hoping to get with project skyline but didn't get, in the end.
