I'm just hoping that the next release, whenever it is, has something significant in it.
To be honest, the last one for me made as much of a step forward as going onto rray.de and grabbing a few plugins. A few years ago we got GATOR, REFERENCE MODELS, ICE etc as upgrades
now we get incremental changes to Gator, and stuff made IN Ice.

I cant help but occasionally succumbing to the pointless lamenting of the absence of all the cool stuff that we would have had by now if Softimage were still in the reigns of a team with a burning incentive to kick Maya's ass.

Yeah, I know what you mean, but I think the problem is that there's lots of stuff being worked on, but its not always in a state to show, and sometimes its not 'sexy' enough for people. People have such various expectations of what a 'feature' actually is, that its just impossible to please people.

To me this looks like an excuse for AD to release even less. Most SAP's to me seemed like nice third party addons like Lagoa. I don't see how that distracted a lot from the core development.

I suspect the regular yearly release will be much the same as it has been or even less, minus the SAP.

Autodesk's one and only goal (like any big corp) is to release as little as possible without losing significant user base. This seems like a calculated step in that direction. They don't have to pay any third party developer to put something in the SAP while keeping the subscription price as is or higher.

Nice going AD.

Three 3d apps with their own strengths, being bundled.

It's not hard to see the strong parts of each app are extended/updated, so you still want to have all three apps.

Sometimes Blender starts to look really interesting.....

Coral is great also, the code is so clean, Andrea used new features of C++11, OpenGL 3 core profile and modern multithreading libraries so it's even faster than ICE. I trying to compile it right now so if someone interested in the last build under windows you can pm me and I send you a copy of it as soon as I finish it.

Oh, and yea, fully agree with Len (ActionArt)

There were only two SAP ever made for Softimage. The one with Lagoa, 2011 SAP, was a big release that almost crushed 2012. It only occured as an SAP because the Suite were being launched in September that year. As a result of it, we were left with only 3 month to do ICE modeling, and dropped features including support for Curves and NURBS. 2012 SAP contained no third party plug-in.

In Softimage 2012 SAP, you got a basic bullet implementation, which of course has to be done by the core developers, who then couldn't help with other ICE project such as Crowd. All the features in 2012 SAP were done by core developers.

you know, the release cycles at Avid was 14-18 months... Now you're saying Autodesk is evil for not pushing for 6 month release updates.. I guess we must have been really evil at Avid! you would never have gotten ICE on this type of three month dev cycles, with the dev contantly jumping on the latest emergency, which is exactly what happens when you're shipping point releases.

The way development works, you have a feature development time and a stabilization time. So if you have a release every 12 month, you may have up to 9 month of dev time that whole year. (If you're actually ready to start when the last one ships - which is never the case.) But if you have two releases in a year, you have up to 6 month dev time total that whole year because you're starting and stopping, and you're launching a beta that's going to generate hundreds of new requests.

At the end of a shorter release cycle, all sort of stuff happens including critical requests from sales and client to jam more in, or stuff that's broken because there wasn't enough time to stabilize. Of course the development of the main release and point release is overlappped, in different development branches, and not all dev work on the point release, but it doesn't add up back to 9 month for the people not working on the point release, because they are needed to help or put out fires on the point release. It ends up monopolizing the same people, who could instead focus, uninterrupted, on a less trivial multi-month project for next release.

It makes no difference whether it comes in the SAP, every 6 or so months , or if it in the main release once every 14 months or whatever, as long as the updates are actually worthwhile and show a deep commitment to developing Softimage in the way it deserves.
However, considering the relatively slow pace of development since AD, and the leaving of the original team to work on Maya. Its hardly surprising that people are wary of any ambiguous Softimage-related news that comes indirectly from AD.

The best thing is to not give out ambiguous news.
ARE you saying plain and simple that by dropping the SAP, we are to expect a much better product development? If so, it might be worth mentioning that at the start, because otherwise, all some of us will feel is. Now AD cant even be arsed to give us the advantage pack.

Keep your head down...Don't disagree with those with more power, Move up the ladder.

I've always hated how many people without admitting it follow those rules.

Pooby, you have a lot of my respect as most people that advance in a field start to keep mum as they progress up the chain. You have very fine works but still are grounded and adamant.

You might not realize that we have had similar expression in other threads and that I have seen that you never cease to keep up the good fight.

Very impressive!

For the record I am not going to be on subscription with AD any longer. I would rather pay more when I decide that the upgrade is justified at this point even if I have to buy a new full license. I see this as another bad progression by AD. I don't want to be in a position where I am feed a new release that binds me contractually to a cloud only license. Lets face it, that is where they want to go.

So no SUBSCRIPTION ADVANTAGE anymore. what is the advantage of subscription now then exactly??