|
I'm pretty sure Soft is hard at work on the new particle stuff. A while
back, Ronald came by our office and talked to us for an hour or so about
what we would like to see and what we didn't like in the existing
particles, which was much appreciated. It's nice to work a block away
from special projects (though I doubt we were the only people they
talked to). Maybe it took a long time, but I think the XSIBase particle
forum seemed to have a big effect on getting the message across that
users really needed a new particle system to happen. And hopefully,
we'll see a lot of those ideas represented in the finished product.
Personally, I'd love to see more similar forums on other topics. Things
shouldn't have to be as bad as the particle system before we start
organizing our thoughts. I think several topics in rendering, including
this one, could use some discussion. (I agree with pretty much
everything you said, by the way, Luc).
It's really not reasonable to expect Soft to parse through every little
request or gripe we make on the mailing list (though I know and
appreciate very much that they try). Likewise, it's not really
reasonable to expect every post from users to be right on the money.
What I do expect is that Softimage and the user community both continue
to improve the lines of communication for discussing what features we
really want and really need in future versions of the software. I think
in terms of getting design ideas across, we still don't have it quite
right with the list, escalation support or regular support. None of
these channels does a good enough job, in my opinion, of formulating and
sharing a consensus of multiple people's opinions. I always get an
empty feeling in my brain when threads like this one die, because we
really haven't formalized anything, and it's not totally clear what we
want, but there's a lot of good thoughts going on. In an ideal world,
with infinite resources, we would all gather and have a summit on render
trees with users, mental ray employees, Softimage employees, and a small
army of pizza guys in attendence. In the real world, maybe we should
just think about taking what happened with the particles forum and
seeing where we can take that sort of dialog. I bet with practice, we
could figure out a really good system for conversing about a topic and
documenting the consolidated opinions. I'm not saying it has to be this
particular topic, but I just think, since there are obviously features
and changes we'd all like to see, we should do that sort of thing more
often, and think about how we can improve the process. We shouldn't
wait for things to get as far behind as particles to consolidate our
thoughts. Especially since it apparently always takes Montreal longer
to implement things than they'd hope ;) Maybe we should even just pick
a new topic every two months or something and have at it.
-Andy
Nick wrote:
and aren't we just tired of talking about that topic.
I guess if the particles were fixed then you probably wouldn't have to
hear anything about it... the problem is nothing's been done about
them for what, 4 major version releases now at least? You can't just
expect the customers to give up on them and shut up, if anything, the
more you don't do anything about them, the more you'll hear noise
about it, until finally you don't hear jack and that's bad news
because it means all your customers have gone elsewhere...
---
Unsubscribe? Mail Majordomo(at)Softimage.COM with the following text in body:
unsubscribe xsi
|
