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I wouldn't have put it like that myself, but I must admit to feeling some concern about eon's latest offerings, which don't seem to have been tested with the care one might expect. Rightly or wrongly, eon seems to have gained a reputation as producing crash-a-lot software; it's not just here or the eon forums where you hear this, but also in pro arenas such as CG Talk, where a common statement goes along the lines of "I'd like to use [insert eon product of choice] because it produces fantastic results, but it just crashes too much to rely on".

You'd think that they would work to repair that perception, but then they produce a paid-for upgrade which seems to make matters worse. I just don't understand their approach, but it has made me very wary of spending more money with them right now.

Absolutely agree. If you go around in other forums, you never see complaints like "the renderer is slow" or "clouds are grainy" (well, actually you see this comment if you go to Terragen forum ) or "flat plant leaves suck". You ALWAYS see people complaining about memory leaks, crashes, xStream integration issues and so on. ALWAYS about BUGS.

I admit that, were I not already a owner of Vue, I would NEVER buy it after reading such comments.

For a comparison, go to MoI (Moments of Inspiration) or L3DT (a terrain generator) or 3DCoat forums. There is a relaxed feeling. People find bugs, the developer (they are all one-man shows...) acknowledges the problem and writes that the update is available. No name calling, not flame wars, nobody bitches because everybody knows that the developer is listening his clients needs and caters for them quickly and efficiently.

In addition, in all these cases the developers are super open about future products directions (L3DT developer has on his site a ALMOST DAILY UPDATED todo list for the next release!). And before somebody writes that they are not developing in commercially competitive environments, remember that 1) MoI is a super affordable NURBS modeler a-la Rhino 2) L3DT is a terrain generator specially tuned for the game modding arena 3) 3DCoat is waging a war against ZBrush...

All boils down to whether you consider your clients as the most precious of you assets are just a bunch of suckers to be squeezed as much as possible.

Bye!!!

GIMP 2.7.4, Inkscape 0.48, Genetica 3.6 Basic, FilterForge 3 Professional, Blender 2.61, SketchUp 8, PoserPro 2012, Vue 10 Infinite, World Machine 2.3, GeoControl 2