Yep, I agree Martin. That reply of mine was not really targetted at the question of Forums as such and my reply to the Forums as such was in an earlier post.
Back when I had time ..... I had thought the RS Forum was dead and had begun posting on the 3DWorld Forum and then it was pointed out to me that the RS Forum is actually not dead at all ... still there. I posted but ... it may as well have been dead. I dont think that means that RS is dead of course. And as stated in my much earlier post I now have no time to devote to any Forum at all. Whether to visit or post to. I guess, in this country, RS might be termed a "boutique" app. Small membership but a seriously advanced tool-set. Neil Cooke ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, 30 March, 2010 11:15:08 AM Subject: Re: QT: about Realsoft 3d Forum Discussion Aidan, I second all you said. For me, Luxology does it right, as do several other companies in this field. On Nevercenters (Silo) website you can watch (and download) quite a few modelling-tutorials for free, some of with could otherwise be sold for solid bucks. In addition they have an extensive gallery, a much-used forum and a wiki like the RS3D-wiki, only with more content. The professional version of Silo comes at around 160$, so I can´t image that they do make that much money out of their product. Still they manage to supply all those ressources. Well, Neil is right - discussions like this have occured several times over the last years. But I don´t follow his argumentation. I think to remember Vesa explicitly saying (must have been around 10 years ago) that they (the Realsoft owners/staff) did not want to run a big company, that they wanted to stay a small business. And I think, this is because of a fear of losing control over ones baby. If I had brought forth an application like Real(soft) 3D and had maintained it through all these years, I at least would definitely see it as "my baby". If now one was to extend the business, one would have to work more/harder, leaving less time for family, friends, hobbies, etc.. Unless one would hand over part of the responsibility to new employees, perhaps making venture-capital of some sort necessary, thus to a degree losing control over the company. I could totally understand that one would hesitate to do that. But in this case, all this does not have to be considerated. If an official Realsoft forum would be that shallowly frequented as the unofficial forum is today, it would most probably cost no notable amount of money. And if it somehow grew to a substancial size, most probably this would also be connected to more Realsoft 3D packages sold, getting more money in then was spent. Same goes with integrating existing resources of other nature. Mailing-list and IRC-channel are nice, but they aren´t up-to-date anymore. Users and couldbe-users just expect to have a forum/board which provides them with information and the possibility to interact with other users. The outstanding advantage of a forum over a mailing-list or IRC-channel is it´s nature of beeing openly accessible. I don´t have to subscribe to a list, I don´t have to be at the right place at the right time to get what I want. I can immediately see what has been discussed, and in a more sorted way. There is no hurdle, no threshold that interested people have to overcome to be able to participate. As of now what seems to be left of the RS3D community seems to be people that have worked with the programm for years; I seldomly see new faces and I wonder if RS3D is even attracting a substantial amount of new customers anymore. Doing some of the things discussed in these years (forum, wiki, tutorials, overall "community-functions") could provide a greater "experience" for all users while most possibly also attracting new customers. Without costing huge amounts of money, work/time or automatically expanding Realsoft to a multi-billion dollar corporation. Well, I am no man of business after all, and I would never ever have achieved what the Meskanen-brothers have achieved with Real(soft) 3D. That aside - I still don´t see the point. Even with taking into account that I have no inside view of the Realsoft business nor any notable experience with running a business at all, I just can´t understand why one would not want to present one's product as good as possible when that wouldn´t even be expensive at all. And so I do think that bringing this topic up over and over again is not a bad thing after all. Seemingly there are people out there who care for those features. And for a "caring customer" I would nearly consider it as duty to openly talk about what you as a customer would like to see. Otherwise, how should the company know what their customers want and how important it is for them? Greetz Martin -- GMX DSL: Internet, Telefon und Entertainment für nur 19,99 EUR/mtl.! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/dsl02
