More VR4SU Griping
-
You're the second person I have heard that from. How's Blender with SU imports?
-
TIG's obj exporter is gold!
-
Is there a demo of Vray Standalone available somewhere?
Edit: one has to use the demo of Vray for Maya, apparently.
-
Hi Deven
First of all we all appreciate a response from the development team. So thank you. I hope you realize that most of our annoyance
is from the fact that VR4SU seems to us, to have never been completed. These year old bugs are hammering our work flow. All we ask are some fixes. I just cannot understand why these were not addressed before starting a new project. You have said on another post that this was Chaos Groups idea. I just hope you can understand how we as paying customers in a very competitive market. Are gutted that a tool we purchased works below par.Please note that I am only talking about bug fixes. I will wait patiently for new features.
Prices of jobs have fallen swiftly in this world economy. I do not get paid nearly as well as I used to for Architectural presentations. So I need a software to preform as it should. At the moment I'm finding that its not. In short. Because of bugs, it takes longer to complete work, which means i earn less money. The learning curve with this software is hard enough as it is. Let alone spending extra time researching and testing work arounds for bugs.
So my questions to you.
Is your next design cycle to fix bugs in the existing VR4SU?
Does that start as soon as VR4R 1.5 is rolled out? (Becomes a paid product)
Are you still on track to roll out VR4R at the end of Feb? (which is now)cheers.
-
Holmes - The company acquisition process took a while, I can't remember how long. CG wanted us to put out a new version of our products as soon as possible, as did we. Both user groups waited a very long time for those updates. VfR production began when we were under the impression that VfS was stable. We didn't discover just how unstable the current version was until we were already under way with VfR development. The plan was to have VfR finished within 3-6 months, rather than a year, so the decision to halt development at that point and put out a VfS patch didn't seem too appealing at the time. We would be finished VfR soon, and then circle back to VfS to take out the rest of the bugs.
There were more issues than expected, quite a few of which were also present in VfS. As we fixed issues in VfR, some were fixed in VfS as well. These fixes have been waiting to be integrated in to a new build of VfS. We don't separate bug fixes from features, a change is a change. So we don't really have a way to make a new build of VfS that doesn't have Dispersion, or RT at the moment. Since some of the changes rely on some host application specific related code, some of those changes will just break VfS entirely until we are able to add in the host application functionality that we need in order for the changes to work properly. There are some other really boring technical things I can talk about too, but I would like to summarize by just saying that there are some things preventing us from just putting out a new build of VfS without putting in a good bit of work unfortunately.
We don't have the time/resources to spend on that at the moment, but as soon as we do, we will put out a build that will address as many of the reported issues as possible. I understand that VfS users are facing some bugs that prevent them from being able to use the product fully and as effectively as they would be able to with those bugs fixed, which I agree is not a good situation. We have some Rhino users that have been waiting a couple of years for some of their bugs to be addressed though, so we can't really spend a couple of weeks (at the end of this development cycle especially) trying to get a new build of VfS out the door. It isn't that we don't care about our VfS users, as I've stated before. 3 or so years of a wait for a new build of VfR was just too much, and we really didn't expect this development cycle to take so long. The goal was to have a new VfR build out the door within a couple of months, and then immediately follow up with an update for VfS that would address the bugs fixed during VfR development, thus making both products even and ready for simultaneous development.
@unknownuser said:
Is your next design cycle to fix bugs in the existing VR4SU?
Our next cycle should hopefully address both products simultaneously. If we are unable to accomplish that, then yes, VfS should be next. We haven't been told that we are going to be reassigned or given another product to work with, so VfS and VfR should be the only two products on our plate for the foreseeable future at the USA office.
@unknownuser said:
Does that start as soon as VR4R 1.5 is rolled out? (Becomes a paid product)
The planning and initial assessment phase, yes. Don't expect VfS beta to start the day after VfR gets officially released!
@unknownuser said:
Are you still on track to roll out VR4R at the end of Feb? (which is now)
We have extended our beta testing phase an additional month, but we are trying to finish up prior to that if possible. There are some issues that need to be addressed in a release, and some that can be handled with a patch. We aren't going to wait until every known bug is fixed prior to releasing, that's not a realistic goal, but we do have some that need to be addressed.
I'm sorry I can't pick an actual date to give you to work with. Well I could, but it's a silly and frustrating game to play, so I'd rather not. I just go by the number of critical bugs that are in our bug tracker. Currently there are about 30 or so left to tackle before we release. How long will that take? I just fixed a duplicate sun issue that only occurs during the upgrade process from 1.05.29 (.30 for vfs). I thought it would take a day at most... Then my work machine's motherboard got fried... then the issue ended up being fairly confusing and complicated... so it actually ended up taking 2-3 days, plus almost a work week of downtime while getting a new machine and setting it up for development. ::shrugs:: That's EXACTLY why I don't pick dates.
We are fully aware that we make a tool that is used by professionals in a production environment. Even though SketchUp is inexpensive (or free), that doesn't mean it isn't relied upon just as heavily as any other visualization tool. We look forward to providing you with a better tool than what you currently have, so that we can all be productive and successful.
-
@dkendig said:
We don't separate bug fixes from features (...)
You should. Really.
Er, I'd like that, in a perfect world.
-
We haven't figured out a way to do that yet with our setup, but if we ever do, I'll let ya know
-
Thank you very much for the explanation. I appreciate your time. I really presumed bug fixes could be rolled out as a patch.
Well here's hoping for a very smooth development run for you. -
In the future it will be easier to roll out patches with bug fixes, now that both products are using the same core. There were some modifications we had to make to our plugin in order for it to work with Rhino, that made it not possible to quickly migrate the changes back to VfS, at the beginning of VfR development. This made it very difficult to migrate the changes back without making a handful of somewhat big changes first. Since VfR development was supposed to take 3-6 months, we didn't think that would be an extremely long wait for a new VfS patch. We were just going to hold off on making the big changes to VfS so we could get VfR up to speed with the recent plugin rewrite. Then we were going to take all of the bug fixes from the VfR development cycle and apply them to VfS. Unfortunately the demand for certain features in VfR required us to make some changes that we did not originally plan for, and between that and the growing pains of the acquisition, our development cycle has taken longer than originally expected.
All being said, I think that this past development cycle has been our best one yet. We managed to tackle a lot of nasty bugs, and add some very powerful features. I can't wait to share those changes with the VfS community! With that being said, off to work I go.
-
Cheers again
Advertisement