_PopArt Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 Maxwell dvelopment has never really made to much sense since the beta. From the totally bizarre RCs to the phantasmagoric RS2 system to the 1.2 'minor' update which is well than more a year in the making, and of course the total silence, you get the feeling that your missing some vital piece of information. In the meantime Indigo has quietly developed geometry instanceing for some time now & is doing some great participating medium development, and fry seems to be proceeding at ferarri speed. All this while NL has quite a big head start i think, at least compared to Indigo. But looking at NL forums i get that same old 'where theres smoke theres fire' feeling So if 1.2 doesn't have some innovative things together with the many many bug fixes, i think its credibility will be completely smoked, with or without the marketing fluff and interviews with the janitor:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 I think part of it is that NL seemed to spend quite a bit of timeon development paths that have not panned out. E.g., the first few RC releases contained a render core that may have been an early attempt at RS2, that they had to scrap or at least put on the back burner because... well, we all know how well it worked. At one point, somebody official (I can't remember who, make it was Darth) was telling us to be patient because they were developing multiple render engines at the same time and they didn't know which one they'd end up using. I can't imagine the feats of release engineering that must have been required to keep a handle on that, but it seemed that NL did not have a full-time release engineer. Even without copying or stealing, just having that precedent to look at would give any developer a lot of ideas about how not to manage a project - any architect can tell you that it's project management that sets the pace and efficiency of the work. (If I read the situation correctly, until they put Juan in charge NL also didn't have a project manager per se.) So does NL have a complaint against FS? Maybe. I have no idea. The possible scenarios for that both seem possible - that somehow FS managed to get some of NL's intellectual property, or that there's no foul here but there's some FUD being pushed aound by a few NL proponents. I don't think anybody outside of those two companies has any real information. If I were to guess, I'd say it's option 2, because the core technology can be produced from publicly known algorithms so there's no good reason to steal it. The similar timing can be explained by both companies seeing an opportunity from an analysis of the trends in CPU design (before 2005 I don't think there were enough computers out there powerful enough to make up a customer base, and for a few years before that it would have been simple to figure out just how much power is needed to run one of these, and about what year the customers would have it) and the fact that they're in the same city... coincidences happen, or maybe some people from both companies to the same professor's computer graphics class. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 maybe some people from both companies to the same professor's computer graphics class. A well reasoned post, Andrew. Hey, maybe feverSoft has had faster, smoother development because they didn't steal NextLimit's code. Maybe NL hardwired some bad choices into their code from early on, and have been fighting to get around them ever since. Not that I know one way or another, just a thought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sawyer Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 Hey, maybe feverSoft has had faster, smoother development because they didn't steal NextLimit's code. LOL! FS sure seems to have had a better time with it than NL has so your right that may prove they did not steal anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 12, 2007 Author Share Posted April 12, 2007 You've got me there Ernest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 At one point in time there were rumors that NL didn't exactly get their inital code in the most ethical of manner. This was prior to Fry's debut. So... not that I have anything other than uninformed speculation, but perhaps the whole 'code borrowing' thing could be the opposite of what was first thought? After all (as previously noted), it is obvious that one group has more skill in developing the algorithm than the other. Which, again, tells us nothing of significance, other than that the code borrowing speculation is probably not worth considering (particularly unless you consider the possibility that NL was the borrower). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 12, 2007 Author Share Posted April 12, 2007 I remember that Ernest thought he had found a program that could have been the predecessor to Maxwell, I don't remember if we ever got an answer to whether NL used it to create Maxwell or if it was just unrelated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 I remember that Ernest thought he had found a program that could have been the predecessor to Maxwell, I don't remember if we ever got an answer to whether NL used it to create Maxwell or if it was just unrelated. That's what I'm thinking of... obviously don't know if there's anything to it or not. Still can't help but think that both companies being located in Madrid is more than just a coincidence... but hey, maybe it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 12, 2007 Author Share Posted April 12, 2007 Yea but if one of these companies was more likely to borrow code wouldn’t it be the newcomer and not the old dog that's been around for years. In reality Fry has been able to do in about a year what took NL 4 or 5. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 I think FeverSoft may have been working on this product, possibly in a different form (the real-time thing?) for longer than we're talking about. The thing I found was a program that did MLT rendering by a Spanish guy who listed as his inspiration Oscar (the programmer) of NL, this program was being done as a personal project like Indigo is now. The thing (I forget what it was called) dis-appeared a few months before Maxwell was first shown on CGtalk, there was a user on MWR forum with th same name as the guy with the project but he never made a single post. Its all coincidence, I was just having fun doing detective work. I asked Juan at the DVC if my idea was correct and he flatly said it was not. So there you go--interesting, but no link. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 I think FeverSoft may have been working on this product, possibly in a different form (the real-time thing?) for longer than we're talking about. Chema (Fryguy) has said some things to that effect, and it does lead the mind to wander... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fran Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 Devin, your logic is painful to watch. One guy in New Zealand wrote a spectral raytracer all by himself (AFAIK). Why isn't everyone speculating that he stole code from NL? What if it wasn't free? What then? What if he was a rival in the market? Why does it not compute with you that someone else could write a spectral raytracer that is better and more efficient in a shorter timespan? If anything, and IMHO, NL is a textbook example of what NOT to do. LOL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 Actually, many people have written spectral raytracers. Not to be off topic, but the 'guy from new zealand' is Nick Chapman and the mlt engine he has developed is called Indigo. It probably doesnt get as much attention as it deserves as it is not a financial competitor with the others. Also another interesting thing is that almost the entire development of the engine is documented in his blog with references information etc of algorithms so its very transparent the development process. Doesn't leave much room for whacky speculation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 Initially I wondered if Feversoft wasn't an unhappy group of ex-NLers or somesuch with an ax to grind and secreted code, but after seeing the pace at which Fry's development has been progressing I find it near impossible to believe that they did anything other than start from scratch on their own. Besides, I think that if they stole NL's code, they'd still be working on debugging it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 12, 2007 Author Share Posted April 12, 2007 Initially I wondered if Feversoft wasn't an unhappy group of ex-NLers or somesuch with an ax to grind and secreted code, but after seeing the pace at which Fry's development has been progressing I find it near impossible to believe that they did anything other than start from scratch on their own. Besides, I think that if they stole NL's code, they'd still be working on debugging it! LOL I love this!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 12, 2007 Share Posted April 12, 2007 Initially I wondered if Feversoft wasn't an unhappy group of ex-NLers or somesuch with an ax to grind and secreted code, but after seeing the pace at which Fry's development has been progressing I find it near impossible to believe that they did anything other than start from scratch on their own. Besides, I think that if they stole NL's code, they'd still be working on debugging it! :D :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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