there are couple of threads on this message board about this.. the big Softimage studios are The Mills, Animal Logic, Capcomp, Konami, sega, square, local ones like Hybride, Shed, etc.. the biggest ones in Japan.Hirazi Blue wrote:One reads this a lot: "big studios" using Softimage influencing the decisions made for the Softimage roadmap. What "big studios" are theseMcNistor wrote:Point is that only the big studios and Autodesk strategy have a say in what will Softiamge look like.
Chinny's explanation for Crowds was that it would be something that the other apps do not have to add to the Suite. We did talk to Blur and Hybride who were about to build their own solution in ICE, but there certainly wasn't a groundswell of enthusiasm from studios for this. The "roadmap" for 2013 was two bullet points, "Crowds" and "Better Viewport" and everything else was openedHirazi Blue wrote: Crowd simulation, for instance, wouldn't seem high on anyone's priority list, as there are several tools a mixed pipeline could access to do just the same. But the "big studios" obviously disagree... ;)
luckily, it doesn't work that way. The "roadmap" usually looks like a list of one of two big features, with a big undefined bucket for maintenance and anything that might come up or the dev team might want/need to do. I would say the majority of the work to be is very loosely planned. And it isn't planned far in advance, except there may be a project or two that take more than a year. It's usually between December and April that the team actually plans the release that will start development in May. "Crowds" was planned a couple of releases in advance, much to my chagrin, but I don't think there is a multi-year plan in place right now, Softimage is more in a roadmap-reboot mode.Hirazi Blue wrote:Not participating (for whatever reason!) in the beta shouldn't disqualify you from voicing an opinion in my book. And I seriously doubt beta testers have any significant direct impact on the larger roadmap anyway, as that would be fixed beforehand.
Developement teams are just normal people and have very short memory and managers have no way to tell what's good or bad in 80,000 bug requests/suggestions, so you do what you can. But you generally don't have to work too hard with the old data, because usually some client is yelling at you for something. You will something read some guy say they logged an issue ten years ago like they're going to get a prize for the oldest bug logged. The facts are that the teams only really pay attention to what's being talked about recently. It's human nature. So you constantly need to engage the team and talk to them, especially now with the changing of the guards.
