luceric wrote: ↑18 Feb 2014, 15:21
Not sure about that characterization as a big/VIP client. You should ask him how many XSI seats, it's probably between 5 and 15, probably old versions. We've had developers spent month looking at various issue for Carbine. He's been on the beta since.. 1997 .. and we've been listening to all the flames for years. Never spoke to anyone else at the company. There were features and bug fixes we did every release for Matt even though he's not been the 100+ seat heavyweight like all the other game customers.
A little clarity:
Carbine had 300+ employees and (at least) 63 seats of XSI at launch of Wildstar in 2014. Autodesk reps visited onsite literally minutes before the announcement went live XSI was being retired. Carbine's parent company, NCSOFT, has many other studios with large installations of Autodesk product (1,000+ seats). This likely qualified Carbine as a VIP client, although we were never addressed as such.
You never spoke to anyone else at Carbine because of Autodesk's policy that only one person per site is allowed as the liaison. I was the designated contact. When Softimage was still under Avid (and before my arrival), Carbine gave up on Softimage because of the sequence of bad releases and lack of attention despite paying for a escalation / special projects contract for two years (their words). I worked very hard to try and right the ship.
I was accepted on the beta in 1999, but didn't participate until 2000 due to change in employer at the time. You're probably thinking 1997 because I was extremely active with tech support and submitting volumes of data to the games team to try to get Softimage|3D on stable ground.
Yes, engineers were tasked with Carbine issues occasionally, but to say it that way is misleading as Softimage was responsible for the issues that required such attention.
Softimage broke major features within the XSI Application that were critical to our ability to function, and repeated the mistake in numerous later releases. Example: real time shaders. Broken in XSI 6.0, 6.01, 6.02, 6.03, and couldn't get an OpenGL context in 6.5. We had to sit down face-to-face with Marc Stevens to put eyes on this problem, but even then it still got botched further before it was resolved. Shaders could not access vertex colors, user normals, or texture projections in XSI 7.0 because somebody decided to change the design of how shaders work without testing it. Instead of using label/value mappings, it used strings (names) instead. Problem was, legacy content could not function in this new paradigm because it was not possible to derive the name of the texture projection, user normal, and vertex color properties from inside the shader. Oops. I had to pound the door again to get escalation to fix it pronto in time for the XSI 7.01 release. Unfortunately, we had to wait until Softimage 7.5. On the calendar that fiasco spanned 18 months.
We were stuck on Softimage 7.5 for five years because later releases had show stopping problems. Softimage 2010 had reference model issues inducing corruptions, Softimage 2011 had a rewrite of the shaders and materials architecture causing the real time shaders to break again. 5 of the 8 beta and RCs for that release did not have functioning real time shaders - it was a repeat of XSI 6.5. When it didn't get fixed in time for the main release, I had to pound the tech support lines to get someone on it, but with no luck. During the Softimage 2012 beta cycle, the shader installation and workgroups were redesigned, but sporadically broken, and also had a geometry corruption in clusters. Both broke the real time shaders. After the issues were not resolved in time for the main release, I had to go through tech support to get someone on the issue. A developer was assigned to get the problem resolved in time for the advantage pack scheduled for the summer, but within a week he went on paternity leave for the next several months leaving us stranded. So no relief in the 2012 service packs. We had to wait until 2013 betas, and again the problem was still a problem and that's why I pounded your inbox. So, yes, you did assign a developer in 2013, but it was to address what was essentially a 2011 show stopping issue that was largely ignored and never resolved.
You must understand the context on the customer side: When I joined Carbine in 2007 the company was on XSI 6.0, 6.01 and 6.02 simultaneously because that release was so bad nothing worked and artists had to pillage functionality from each release depending on the task. Despite being on an escalation contract at the time, we had to wait until Softimage 7.5 (18 months later) before we got relief. That lead to Carbine terminating the escalation contract. Once on Softimage 7.5 we were stuck on it for the next five years until 2013 SP1 came out with the fix your engineer delivered (it shouldn't have come to that). Overall that's nearly 7 years at $40K per year in maintenance, or $280,000 for 2 functional releases. Not a good return on investment. Almost equates to buying new licenses at full price. Every release that came and went was a time I had to have a long closed-door conversation with the producer explaining why we weren't upgrading, and why we should continue to pay maintenance for a product that isn't working. On several occasions he was going to pull the plug on Softimage, but I had to reassure him I could get the issue resolved...because if he had pulled the plug I would've been out of a job. Not exactly a good situation for me as it was during the great recession. So maybe now you'll understand why you received such "flames".
