I don't think Daz is going to release Carrara anytime soon. My guess is they put a bunch of money into it to "Daz" it up for content and found that studio is still returning more content interest than C so they've basically shelved it. There is no commercial incentive fo Daz to push the code forward (or they would do so).

Daz is still on the move to consume market share as we have seen so they have money. They are simply not interested in Carrara or Bryce (just Daz content). I'm also guessing they would want a lot of money for somebody to take it off their hands. Then whoever bought it would need to put some significant work into it to un-Daz it by decoupling all the Daz tentacles it has now and then to upgrade it for a new version that people would want.

That's a fairly large investment. Probably $750,000 in manpower for coding work and then who knows how much money Daz would want to sell it. Let's say it's $1,500,000 to get Carrara into shape for C9.

That would mean that at least 10,000 copies of the code @ $150 a copy would need to sell before there was any profit needed for the next release.

I don't know how many C users are out there but I'm pretty sure it isn't 10,000. We had users complaining for months here about the latest release pricing so I'm pretty sure $150 is about the price point that would be maintainable.

I don't know why Daz bought C in the first place. Maybe Eovia just wanted to give up or something and Daz got it for cheap. Now, Daz has it and Daz is not in financial trouble so they aren't going to sell it for cheap (they don't need to). They also have no motivation to upgrade it for the cost given the user base is now too small for commercial viability.

I'm guessing on most of that but it's a theory that answers a lot of questions.

If C somehow did get released into an open source organization, at least it would be moved forward as OS's changed and we would see some movement. Once again though, there's no practical reason why Daz would do that.

Now, as we see, C is basically drying up on the vine and drifting into our past.

Hobbyist CG artwork is a tenuous market. Most serious CG people go into commercial organizations that do CG for a living and the majority of the hobbyist community is oriented around the poser/Daz type of stuff. The true interest in C really got serious when Poser figures could be imported. That means that Daz views C as a studio competitor given that the vast majority of the users basically do the same kind of artwork.

So, from Daz's point of view, the number of Daz users versus C users is very different and Daz is putting its efforts into the market that most hobbyist's use (studio and not C).

It's kind of a weird combination of really bad luck for us C users.

Until Daz decides to turn the code loose, I don't think we are going to see any development and I really can't figure out why Daz would turn it loose. Bryce has a bigger user base than C and it's the same story for that code. If Daz has also killed Bryce, there is no way C would survive.

-Kix