the future? (was: the "frustration" thread)

[Bellsey]

I think that's being very harsh, blimey give the poor guys a chance, eh?
Besides, Chinny was only over here in London late November last year and saw several people then. What happens now about further visits, I don't know, but I have been in contact with the Singapore guys regarding if its possible to get people over here.

[origin]

A new frustration: I personally am truly disappointed in the so-called Singapore Team. In a time of turmoil they could have visited the user communities/forums to reach out to the user base. This might have helped to get the message across that the change of teams wasn't necessarily a bad thing. They didn't. Personally I would call this a missed opportunity to connect meaningfully to the people who actually buy the stuff you develop...

Never seen any of 3ds max/maya devs over forums, so xsi was something special.

TBH I'm not surprised that Luc-Eric left, if you check how tone of his posts changed over last year you would see that something was going on ;)
But I'm abit surprised that G. Laforge left, I thought he was given 'cool' projects to work on and as far as I know devs (at least ones that left my company) all they want is interesting projects and self-development.

[j3st3r]

Actually they talked on the softimage mailing list...it was a nice move, apparently many of them are coming with strong game developer background...

Back to my biggest concerns, about bugfixes: I see many shiny new features, that are not really useful (or partially), but long reported bugs remain unattended. The famous OBJ exporter bug (no UV exported if you have user normals) are not fixed, however it seems that the exporter doesn't append another OBJ extension to the file nmae picked in a fiel dialog (like new.obj.OBJ). My problem is that it's not granted that a bug will be fixed. I'd rather download weekly or monthly patches, service packes than wait a year or a half for the next release, when we have an annoying bug...or lack of feature...like ultimapper without cage...and so on. I still love to work with Softimage, but these small things annoy me

[Hirazi Blue]

@Bellsey - I am more than willing to give the "poor guys" a chance. Please do not read stuff into my post I didn't put there! I really hope the future will still hold the possibilty of improved relations between the new team and the online communities. But that's basically besides the point here, as my post explicitly expressed the frustration I feel with the current situation, where they quite obviously failed to see the point of making themselves visible/available in a time of specific and quite obvious turmoil (i.e. the "move" from Montreal to Singapore). Personally I don't believe very much will change in this respect in the future, but I am more than willing to be proven wrong.
My frustration, to spell it out once more, was based on the current situation, which could have been handled way better, if some of the new team had gotten on the forums to "show" themselves.

@origin - "so xsi was something special", it's true, xsi in this respect always has been. But the willingness of some of the team to participate in the ongoing struggle that is forum life was part of a tradition that the new team should truly take into consideration, as the communities (xsibase & si-community) are still an important part of what keeps a product like Softimage alive IMHO.

@j3st3r - Could be that I missed something, but AFAIK there was one introductory post by Chun-Pong Yu, which was promising in itself, but (again AFAIK) hasn't seen a follow-up yet. (EDIT: technically that's incorrect. I just checked and found one more post by Chun-Pong Yu in that specific "Intro" "thread", but this doesn't really change my basic point here...) And besides the Mailing List is a different beast from the online communities and was as such not included in my "frustration".

;)

[j3st3r]

In that respect, I fully agree with you, Hirazi.

[grahamef]

To be fair, there have been several posts on the mailing list by other members of the team including those listed by Chun-Pong.

[Hirazi Blue]

To be fair also, my "frustration" wasn't about their presence on the Mailing List... ;)