My Vue experience has sort of been at both ends of the spectrum.

My first Vue-ing was Vue 4 demo (I think). Back then I was a brycer and wanted to see what Vue was like after chatting with Thomas Krahn in rosity's chat room and seeing what he could do with it. The Vue 4 demo was so unstable, I uninstalled it straight away and stayed with bryce (the V4demo literally crashed as soon as I did anything).

V5i I got free with Lightwave and on my system it was on par with Daz Studio alpha for stability. Once again it was unusable so I went back to bryce 5. But to be fair, I did manage one commercial project using it - but it was more of a load terrain/dump ecosystem on it/ render sort of project, so nothing too complicated. By the end, the last update was more usable, but still pretty crashable for me, so nothing really got done in it bar that one project.

Vue 6i... I convinced myself that that one commerical V5i project could pay for the V6i update  and I'd be "cost neutral" even if V6i update was a dud. On the same computer that V5i was crash city, V6i was actually quite reasonable from the get-go. The pre-release, even with its bugs was soooo much more stable for me than any Vue, patched or non-patched, before - it was stable enough for me to actually do the things I wanted to try in it.

Then e-on redid the memory/resource managment in one of the early patches (maybe even one of the pre-release patches) and it got worse again. But then with more patches it slowly got better again, though it still seemed to fall over sooner with respect to memory usage issues than the first pre-release did. But.... recently my old vid card died and I had to replace it with another old vid card (went from ati->nvidia and more ram) and now Vue 6 is really quite nice - i.e. its stable and does what I expect it to do (and what its meant to do according to the manual with respect to error messages and things). The forced changing of the vid card made a big difference (even though Vue says it was happy and compatible with both old and newer cards).

So thats my story - luckily, for me, v6i ended well.

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD