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C4D future info & development


jwiede

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1 hour ago, caliburn said:

Dont get me wrong,if the blog reads the same in 6 months then MAXON deserve all the criticism they get,but im just hopeful that the blog was started at a bit of a daft time,and now we are in a new year things will start to progress 

 

The biggest problem I have is with the time passed since these issues "went critical", versus the actual level of response we've received from MAXON.   Months came and went while we were told the blog was "being planned", more since the first post, and there's still not been a single posting which in any way practically addresses the issues we were told motivated the blog in the first place.

 

We can always give them more time, sure, but remember that the reason for the requested communication is to try and resolve customer issues regarding the contents of recent versions.  Six months from now, R18 will be all be frozen, and the window for any discussions to impact the release will be long closed.  The end goal here isn't just MAXON communicating with customers, its about MAXON establishing open channels of communication with customers to try and resolve growing customer dissatisfaction with Cinema4D's value, progress and direction.  

 

Instead, the postings come across as exactly the kind of "communication" customers have always received from MAXON.  Viewed as such, the content of the initial blog postings are quite disappointing to many customers, because they do not make any visible progress towards the goals customers were told the blog would help address.  

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5 hours ago, jwiede said:

 

...

 Six months from now, R18 will be all be frozen, and the window for any discussions to impact the release will be long closed.

...

 

That's not correct. I remember reading here at the Cafe, that at the time R17 was released, R18 was well under way with the planning, and there was not much possibility to address changes.

 

If you take that sentence out of your post, I can take it at face value.

 

It was about September that the talk of a "more open MAXON" was being addressed, or trying to be addressed by the american MAXON team. How long ago? Nearly 5 months. I believe the question they must be trying to answer at HQ is "What can we (partially) disclose, which won't hurt us?"

 

If nothing is disclosed (or partially disclosed) that might mean two things: there is a so breakthrough technology being implemented that they don't want to share it with the competition, or what they have to share would dishearten their customers. 

 

The third possibility is creating a blog and keep doing what they were doing, in the hope that things calm down. This last option can shoot back worst than any of the other two, as it will take credibility from their statements.

 

I'm not questioning here the work or attitude put by some MAXON co-workers on the plate, who are giving their best to keep MAXON's customers happy, and doing a good work at it. I'm talking about MAXON as a company. 5 months and 2 posts in an blog (never mind the contents), which has been expected by customers to show a "more open MAXON" is, IMHO, a little bit scarce. 

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4 hours ago, Cutman said:

You appear to be the ideal MAXON customer that easily pleased by mediocrity forgive the rest of us who have higher expectations.

 

What you seem to be expecting from the blog is nothing more than already exists i.e. no communication of any value. What the rest of us want is solid information that gives us confidence that all of those feedback remarks that were submitted are being addressed. We expect more than a tweet's worth of information wrapped up in flannel.

 

Go and look on YouTube at the amount of Technology Preview and Sneak Peek information Autodesk releases regarding research and development that shows their customers they're on the case and moving forward. MAXON can only be bothered to half heartedly start a blog post and you think we should rejoice in that?

I'm not saying you should rejoice, just don't sh** all over it when it's only really one post old.  I'm sorry you don't see any value in knowing that perpetual licenses are safe.  I personally find that to be extremely valuable... like nearly $4,000 worth of value, actually.  

 

And no, I'm not expecting the blog to be more of what already existed, because what we had before was nothing.  Now we have something.  It's only nothing when you mix in your grossly premature opinion, which doesn't change the fact that it's still something (a blog is something, yes?) and not nothing.

 

This isn't a matter of me having low expectations, this is about some having too high an expectation (yourself included).  MAXON is not going to share their entire roadmap publicly, definately not this early in the development cycle, just like you're not going to share your credit card number, expiration date and 3-digit security code with me.

 

You can't compare MAXON to Autodesk.  They have a bazillion products, they are the de facto industry standard in just about every market they've penetrated, they have resources that make MAXON's look paltry by comparison.  They can afford to dedicate development resources and time into generating tech previews and whatnot.  MAXON, not so much.  Besides, at what point did MAXON promise to do a complete 180 and start sharing everything they're working on?  No need to answer, that was rhetorical, because they didn't.  They promised to communicate with us more, and that's exactly what they've done thus far.  You can sh** on them if/when they don't follow through (I know I will!), but that time certainly isn't now.

 

What I ask is quite reasonable:  Wait for there to be sufficient data before you render any kind of judgement.  Right now they have one real post that, despite your opinion, offers critically important information.  Can any legitimate c4d user honestly say that they don't care about the future of their very expensive perpetual license?  Even someone who's a gung-ho subscription fanboy is going to want their perpetual license to still be worth something, which won't be the case if perpetual licenses (and their upgrade paths) go bye-bye.

 

-kvb

 

 

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R18 will be feature frozen right now apart from maybe a few minor tweaks. Beta testers will be starting to get their hands on the new R18 stuff as it rolls out over the next month or so. It then gets 3-4 months Beta testing and bug fixing before release date.

 

95% of what's coming in R19 will be all planned out and some coding will be being done for it right now.

 

Just to show how bad MAXON's communication is and how out of touch management is, not once in all the years I was Beta testing did the CEO and CFO post anything in their Beta testing forum. Quite a contrast from the brief stint of Beta testing I did for Luxology a few years ago where management were very active and quite willing to explain why this or that couldn't be implemented right now or say "we're working on it but it won't come until X version".

 

I thought the MAXON blog if you can call it a blog was too little and too late. Management needs to spend some time looking at what their competitors are doing.

 

Fun times ahead if R18 is another weak upgrade.

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honestly im really hoping this secrecy is leading up to something big. Because MAXON's draw has never been about being ahead of the competition in features... i mean honestly if they disclosed all of R16 and R17 and probably R15's feautures years in advance, what could possibly be done with that information by the competition? no one is going to switch to maya from cinema, because it also gets a camera tracker... takes and tokens have existed in a most apps forever. even c4d had a plugin for it. 

 

i don't think anyone picks c4d for grounbreaking new features, we pick it because its easy to use, because the interface makes sense. because its very procedural. All this stuff is well known to the competition... I just don't get why all the secrecy... 

 

Like imagine if MAXON comes out and shows us a demo of their new GPU enchanced/mutlithreaded viewport ( assuming/hoping they are working on one). What modo or autodesk or houdini are suddenly gonna go: "!@#$, we need to do that before R18 is released". and then through some crazy all nighters they pull it off. c4d users aren't gonna switch... mainly because modo and maya already have that...

 

just.. meh... 

 

 

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The whole notion that disclosing plans to customers is risky because it could somehow trigger ceding major competitive advantage for competing large-scale/complex app developers falls somewhere between absurdly naive and complete logistical folly.

 

Development of large, complex software applications simply does not occur in a way that generally:  Allows teams to massively revise their own development plans in response to hearing of a competitor's interest in something;  Allows teams to complete restart their integration and QA processes and schedules at a moment's notice to accommodate such development revisions; Nor allows teams to modify any of the myriad other non-sw-development product dev processes in a timely-enough manner for them to complete them before the source of the info -- for anything they weren't already in a position to achieve in the first place.

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6 hours ago, 3DKiwi said:

R18 will be feature frozen right now apart from maybe a few minor tweaks. Beta testers will be starting to get their hands on the new R18 stuff as it rolls out over the next month or so. It then gets 3-4 months Beta testing and bug fixing before release date.

 

95% of what's coming in R19 will be all planned out and some coding will be being done for it right now.

 

Fair enough, R18 would be frozen to feature-level changes, agreed.  I disagree that R19 would be beyond significant feature adjustment if determined to be a priority need, though, and so the closing of that window would be a reasonable an example.

 

My main point stands, MAXON creating a blog was never the end goal.  The blog was simply a vehicle intended to help facilitate reaching that end goal, that it wasn't even achieving that purpose raises questions about MAXON's commitment to reaching that end goal.

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10 hours ago, jwiede said:

The whole notion that disclosing plans to customers is risky because it could somehow trigger ceding major competitive advantage for competing large-scale/complex app developers falls somewhere between absurdly naive and complete logistical folly.

 

Development of large, complex software applications simply does not occur in a way that generally:  Allows teams to massively revise their own development plans in response to hearing of a competitor's interest in something;  Allows teams to complete restart their integration and QA processes and schedules at a moment's notice to accommodate such development revisions; Nor allows teams to modify any of the myriad other non-sw-development product dev processes in a timely-enough manner for them to complete them before the source of the info -- for anything they weren't already in a position to achieve in the first place.

Spot on jweide.

 

MAXON announcing sculpting tools or the rebirth of Bodypaint is not going to cause a seismic shift in the VFX industry because MAXON will never be competing with ZBrush and Mari, the people who would be really interested inhering of serious developments would be long suffering C4D users who've all but given up hope of Bodypaint being brought up to date and made usable by contemporary standards.

 

If MAXON really did have a crack team of developers hidden away working on C4DX a completely reimagined application that has been written from the ground up with modern code and modern hardware in mind and it will address all the concerns about object handling, be completely multi threaded and have a high performance nodal programming environment like Houdini as a replacement for XPresso. There's nothing to stop them saying to their customers, yep we're working on object handling issues etc with a view to giving the user a step change in performance without giving the game away they're working on a completely ground up version of C4D. It's not happening BTW I was just using a bit of fantasy to illustrate a point.

 

With the huge development times it's looking like it's going to be many years before the key performance issues are going to be addressed which leaves users wondering if anything is happening at all......which is why users want more and better communication!!!!!!

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  • 5 weeks later...
On January 14, 2016 at 1:27 AM, caliburn said:

What i think is happening is that you need to look more at who the people are and what they DO in the company before

getting worked up in this blog, i mean the CEO isnt going to say "yeah were going to have realtime gpu rendering next version - look out for it guys!" he is mainly responsible for the company direction as a whole and delegates all the other stuff downwards.

so i expect there to be quite a few more people start to post on the blog and talk about things that are relevant to what they do/are working on.

 

A month later, no further posts, and your expectations are looking less and less likely.

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I liked the potential subscription announcement, though that may not be of much use to many others.

 

The blog seemed so cool when Rick B. indicated that we'd be hearing from different voices around the world, and when MAXON said around Christmas that they had lots of cool plans for it.  I want that version of the blog.  This current version makes me wonder why they spent so many months setting it up if all they really wanted to do was ignore it.

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On 14/02/2016 at 0:44 AM, jwiede said:

A month later, no further posts, and your expectations are looking less and less likely.

yep its looking that way :/ talk about missed opportunies........

i mean even if they had no idea what to put in the blog,could just look at competitors efforts,its not rocket science....

 

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