@rstar, there has been word from inside DAZ that there is indeed a group of people inside the DAZ crew that are passionate about bryce development. However at the same time, they had a shortage of developers.

DAZ has spent time buying a lot of different software applications, this costs a lot of money. Also DAZ's income thrives because of the low prices on their product line, which makes for many sales. but less profit per sale. Or in the case of "hexagon for $2" or "bryce 5.5 for $5" probably no profit at all.

Now imagine you have this group of applications aquired. They're from different manufacturers, so they all have a different code base. They're sometimes really old code, so they're not as clean and object oriented as some of todays code. And none of your developers have seen the code before in their life. Thats a development teams nightmare situation! They have to work through all this foreign code, try to understand it, fix bugs in it, optimize it, etc. and then they have to try and make new features.

Due to the relatively small size of DAZ they had to hire external developers on the bryce project, they've said this themselves on a previous occation. That means that all the knowledge aquired by developers familiarizing themselves with the old code, as well as the new probably largely re-built or re-structured code won't remain in-house. When DAZ has to let go of these external developers again, their knowledge and expertise is no longer available to the DAZ team (obviously).

All this to me looks not like a lack of passion, rather then an overdose of optimism, or perhaps a lack of long-term planning.

Either way, wether you are a large company with many developers or not... It would always be good to sooner or later try to make the aquired technology easily available to all projects in your product line. It takes time, it takes effort, but once its done, it means you can do more, with less developers. And with most the code in cararra and bryce being a bit old, and needing revision, why not hit 2 birds with 1 stone? I think that's what DAZ is doing now.

Wether or not that will be good or bad for Bryce is only something time will tell... The changes taking place are something DAZ simply needs to do to be able to keep momentum with their development. However, if they dont have a clear plan, things like this can also become a death trap. Most important thing is that DAZ will make a good plan, and thinks well about what they want to achieve.

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