At a risk of leading the discussion in a completely wrong direction... The fact that the "community" itself is a little scattered doesn't help. The userbase is not big enough to have xsi-base, si-community, area, cgtalk, the list etc. all remaining active all the time. If it was more centralized, more people would take a notice more quickly.

But there's no helping that, so its only natural to expect things to move a little slow...

You're right, that's a completely different discussion. I only brought up the traffic to the si-community because at the moment we're experiencing somewhat of a slump in user activity, even by our own standards, but IMHO we shouldn't be deterred by that (sad) fact...

After using the compound for a real worldish scenario, I have found a few things that would improve the workflow and be advantageous as more compounds are added.

On the Base, somebody asked for a DNA helix, and it was very simple to put together. However, some improvements I can think of:
-> Detach the Set Particle Data into its own compound
-> Specify a "Particle Type ID" attribute for every cloner compound
-> Together with the detached Set Particle Data, one could then control particle data per cloner without having to use separate ICE trees*
-> If the red compound problem can't be fixed, also detach the Geometry Array into its own cloner compound
-> Having a few more, but ultimately smaller compounds is probably preferrable anyway

*alternatively, one could specify the particle data in the Add Point node upon creation, but this does not allow users to later change particle data per cloner

To prevent this whole subforum from "going dodo" on us fast, I would urge one of you to just open the first project. If it doesn't work the way you/we planned there is plenty of time to discuss why and how to do it better before opening a second one... (you can treat it as a "beta test" for all the good stuff to come)

done, those who want to contribute to the mograph stuff, here is the link:
http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=1898

lets hope this and other ideas can get people excited... hope

It might be time to start thinking about the next ICE project...

A suggestion: Computing radiosity using ICE

Well, I sincerely hope that the lack of response to rray's suggestion and/or the lack of other suggestions for new ICE projects doesn't mean that this subforum already has died and gone to forum-heaven...

I prefere to think people are just getting sucked by the big blackhole of time in December... I like Rrays suggestions, but I wonder about two things:

1. Would more basic challenges atract more people?
2. Should these compounds be more towards usefulnes or exeperimentalnes?

I think it would be nice to work on something everyone can use, something that's been requested a lot and not too difficult to start. I'm thinking modeling tools but that's just me. And yes, December is a busy time...maybe January when we're all broke and everything is frozen solid (here at least).