leoA4D Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 See Victor's announcement here: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10486 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 That is encouraging. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smeggy Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 Yeah, until he pushes it back again. Heard it all too many times before to get fooled again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 I think it's more likely that we won't see RC5 until the end of January, I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be ready before then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 Agreed. Believe it when you see it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bricklyne Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 In view of RCs 1,2,3 and 4, I found this to be particularly amusing: ".... but the Maxwell testing group resisted the release of RC5 as it did not pass some of our quality control tests." "quality control"?????? Seriously? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 Most believeably comment I've ever seen on that forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fran Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 It's possible that the concept of quality control was introduced in light of the RC fiasco. Sometimes people actually learn from their mistakes. Seriously. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during that NL/beta team chat. I suspect it went something like this: NL: okay, then, put a fork in this baby, it's done! beta: erm, are you insane? It doesn't install correctly, features a-h aren't implemented, i-q haven't been tested, and it crashes all the time. NL: so what are you saying? beta: if you release this I quit. NL: [pouts, gives beta silent treatment]. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bricklyne Posted December 30, 2005 Share Posted December 30, 2005 It's possible that the concept of quality control was introduced in light of the RC fiasco. Sometimes people actually learn from their mistakes. Seriously. ..........which would beg the obvious question as to why it is that the producers of such multi award-winning and battle-tested software as Realwave and Realflow, would be, (prior to the RC fiascos) so unfamiliar with this concept of quality control, until now. Particularly in a field such as CG visualization and rendering where quality is everything. Seems to me, to be something that should have been learned a hell of a long time ago and not with the sort of on-the-fly pace that the RCs seemed to have been cobbled together. Anyways, I guess we'll see next week (or the week after, or the week after........, or maybe the one after that....). It just seemed kind of funny coming from Big Stone Face, who seems to need a few lessons in Moderator behaviour quality control, of his own, IMHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yog Posted December 31, 2005 Share Posted December 31, 2005 It's possible that the concept of quality control was introduced in light of the RC fiasco.That's a very frightening statement. I would have said it would have been extremely (verging on impossible) for any company not to have some ingrained Quality Control proceedure in place right from the start. I worked in a traditional drawing office for many years, and not one drawing left the office left the office without being checked by an independant checker, and this was before the days when "Quality Control" was a buzz phrase. So I would find it extremely hard to beleve that an established company like Next Limit didn't have some rigourous prceedure in place for such a complex project .... if it weren't for the shocking evidence of RC's 1 -4. The most frightening aspect is, what state will Version 1.0 be released in, and what frequency/quality of patches we could expect to follow ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted December 31, 2005 Share Posted December 31, 2005 If RC1-4 were any indication of things to come then RC5 will require many months of tweaking with updates and patches before it becomes fully operational. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted January 2, 2006 Share Posted January 2, 2006 If the statement is true then its starting to look more and more like some programmers walked off at a certain point...The quality level from the alphas and the beta was pretty high - even the thought that NL, after having promised that 'the journey ends with RC5' (or something like that), would just release another dud in silence is astounding. Something's wrong here... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 I'm starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that 1.0 will be missing some major features--to be added "some days" after release. I'll have my first anniversary with Maxwell in a few weeks, and they still can't seem to get sunlight to go through glass, or make clipmaps work. :/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
buffos Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 I really think that a complete Maxwell will arrive in 2007. Not a day sooner. And maybe then Vray would be there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trick Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 I really think that a complete Maxwell will arrive in 2007. Not a day sooner. And maybe then Vray would be there. It's more then a year now since I bought the first alpha: at that time they announced features I now don't see anymore (at least for the 1.0 release). If you mean "complete" with these features I'm NOT that optimistic !!! Chaos, Cebas and Splutterfish have a huge ToDo-list and are way behind schedule so I wouldn't bet on them. Mental Ray is known for it's solid production readyness so I don't think they will introduce a slow MLT variant. I have more hopes on some new third parties... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 Its funny that after a year the mr forum is still full of the same questions "are clipmaps working?" or "will sunlight pass through glass?" and they're still giving out the same answer - "maybe" or "it should"...So we know that after 2+ years of development they still havent managed to solve the fundamental problems that mlt algorithms have led them to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 One thing that bothers me about what Victor had to say about RC5 is that the speed issue hasn’t been dealt with yet. He keeps saying everything will be optimized at the end but this is by far the most important thing that needs to be addressed in my opinion. If they can't get Maxwell to render out a high rez image with no noise in a 15 hour period then what is the point of having all of that other stuff? I guess you could rely on cooperative rendering to get the job done but most people don't have multiple computers to work with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 I'm starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that 1.0 will be missing some major features Ya think? So I paid in advance for a Mercedes, waited a year and a half and got a Toyota. So even as we see progress from Spain and communications from Darth Mod, we still come back to the need for a roadmap. What works, what doesn't, what's do-able, what's not? It's really a lot to ask of people to wait until the last moment to know whether their 'must-have' features will be there or not. This is professional software, people must be able to make plans and make promises to their clients. Is realtime GI possible? No? Too bad, but at least I know not to tell my client I can deliver the animation in an hour. If everything we were told would be in 1.0 cannot be, we need to know sooner than later. How are we to base our professional products on this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bricklyne Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 Ya think? So I paid in advance for a Mercedes, waited a year and a half and got a Toyota. So even as we see progress from Spain and communications from Darth Mod, we still come back to the need for a roadmap. What works, what doesn't, what's do-able, what's not? It's really a lot to ask of people to wait until the last moment to know whether their 'must-have' features will be there or not. This is professional software, people must be able to make plans and make promises to their clients. Is realtime GI possible? No? Too bad, but at least I know not to tell my client I can deliver the animation in an hour. If everything we were told would be in 1.0 cannot be, we need to know sooner than later. How are we to base our professional products on this? I'm particularly miffed that they still haven't sorted out the Sunlight/glass issue, and don't seem like they'll have it ready any time before v1.0. - if then, even. How is anyone expected to produce realistic architectural renders with such a ridiculous bug, such as this, not sorted out? It tells me that they're still far from setting the ship right with regards to the code of this thing despite the fact they claim that they had to completely re-write it after the Beta. Seems like the re-write din't help at all, and they tried to rectify the situation with a new material system, which also seems to have failed. I know there's quite a number of people over at the NextLimit forum saying that this is not a priority ( the sunlight through glass issue) for their rendering purposes, but seriously, come on!! And of course to add insult to injury their solution is to suggest that there are work-arounds, or rather there will be work-arounds, which I can only assume to mean that they will recommend you model your buildings to without glass on the windows. The vagueness and extents to which the Mods, beta-testers and dvelopers over at the Forum, seem to be avoiding or dancing around this issue whenever it's brought up just speaks volumes about what the development status of the program current is. Until they fix this particular problem, I can't see how I will be able to consider Maxwell a serious renderer at all, despite all the bells and whistles they add to it, before then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leoA4D Posted January 3, 2006 Author Share Posted January 3, 2006 1. M~R is not going to sing for a year or more. Use it in production? Who knows. 2. A road map and refunds are good ideas, but, NL is not going to open up and have a reasonable conversation with anybody. Complaints filed with the EU seems to be the only workable first step. 3. Darth mod's announcement and Q&A made RC5 sound like an Alpha, so, wait until RC5 hits the streets and its condition is known. If it's a bad one, pressure NL to rename the RCs. Not renaming magnifies the farce and wreaks. Since they are stuck with "RC", let them rename it RCAlpha1-n and RCBeta1-n. Then, let the versions V1-n start. No more RCs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 I think the problems with clipmaps & sunlight are directly related to the mlt/bi-directional algorithms they are using. So, the detour they took with the new material system wasn't really a new element they decided to throw on at the wrong time, but a necessary step (a complete rewrite of the materials system) in order to have the possibility of having clipmaps/skylight/glass etc. I guess having reworked the mat system from zero they decided to add the coating feature, which is definitely interesting, but probably it added more problems than it solved. It will be interesting to see if they eventually get them working, AFAIK no one else has up till now. I'm sure the mods can't say very much, as NL probably fears a big drop in sales (or a bigger drop) if they come out and say 'who knows' or 'we have no idea'. We'll see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
buffos Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 The question i have is a simple one. Why do i think that at the same time last year, things were supposed to be at a more advanced stage? For the time beeing features are beeing subtracted. No SSS. No skylight, No fog, No clipmaps, No this No that. I really think that if in 3 months they dont show substantial progress, the Maxwell project will collapse or abandond Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 Why do i think that at the same time last year, things were supposed to be at a more advanced stage? Because we all believed their advertising, there was no ambiguity about it Maxwell 1.0 at this time last year was only a few months away from being released. Even after the first release date was missed there was no indication that there were any serious problems. Now we are faced with the scenario that 1.0 may never be seen, especially if people start perusing legal action. The communication between NL and us is as bad as it's ever been and we are continually given these general statements from Victor and the "A-team" but we all know this is just a smoke screen to keep us from causing even more trouble for them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted January 3, 2006 Share Posted January 3, 2006 Hi All- Could someone please post the text from the link at the beginning of this thread? I was out of country and away from computers for the last 3 weeks, and when I returned I posted a single, seemingly not-terribly-controversial post on the Maxwell forum and was banned without explanation. From reading threads here (this dedicated Maxwell form on CGArchitect was a great idea) NL has obviously tightened the rules... wish I was privy to that earlier. EDIT: Err, never mind. Went to the forum with another browser, and was at least able to read the announcements section. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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