EClark1894 opened this issue on Jul 05, 2019 ยท 217 posts
Penguinisto posted Sun, 21 July 2019 at 4:49 PM
randym77 posted at 2:10PM Sun, 21 July 2019 - #4357629
DAZ is kind of an interesting example. They are clearly courting the gaming industry, but their emphasis on pinup girls doesn't seem like a great fit for that.
...but we'll always have DOAX, dammit!
Far too many good posts that do a good enough job at it to bother with a direct rebuttal of earlier stuff on my part, but I did want to tidy up one bit or two:
Quoth ssgbryan: "Low level scripters have stepped up in the past and delivered (PhilC, Netherworks, Dimension3D, etc), If you can script in Python, you can develop add-ons. You don't need to hire a 6 figure programmer - hire a Python code monkey and HAVE A CLEAR SCOPE OF WORK. Because at some point, you have to shoot the coder and get the product into production."
Err, two developers on my team write primarily in Python these days, and one of them gets paid $110k/yr (and I promise you, he earns every penny of it.) Welcome to the West Coast, where mid/senior-level devs will cost you money in any language (and seriously, anything less than $175k/yr in Silly Valley is literal poverty wages.) We're not talking about slapping together something on a hobbyist level, or something that may have been cobbled together off of StackExchange here... we're talking about pro-grade stuff that is elegant, supported, resource-efficient, and (should be!) maintained. Also, Poser's API likely still isn't IMHO sufficiently open to everything that Python can do (Note to Rendo: I'm prepared to be pleasantly wrong on this note... please make me wrong here in case I end up buying the application.)
Now if a professional wants to write and give-away/sell something for less than his or her time is worth, that's on them... but most won't.
One other bit:
" Poser/DS also requires a real computer, not a laptop (ask me how I know), "
Let me share a few specs here...
...so is that suddenly not sufficient to run Poser or DS, just because all that horsepower happens to be ensconced in an Acer Aspire 7 17" laptop? DS.latest (using iRay w/ all the bells and whistles) runs just perfectly fine on this thing, and I suspect Poser 11 Pro will as well, so, well, I'm going to ask you how you somehow know it wouldn't (as you've invited me to.) I mean, it ain't the latest/greatest, but it's way more than enough to clear the minimum spec hurdles, I trust?
I promise I'm not nagging/trolling here, but pointing to a demographic fact: Fewer and fewer people are going to have big ol' fire-breather desktops with big monitors perched on a table somewhere. More and more people are going to have laptops (w/ maybe a few external monitors.) Desktops are still around, but more often than not they're secondary devices these days. Now how are you going to lure new users in if the first thing out of your mouth is to tell them they need to go buy a whole new (pricey!) computer just to run this stuff? Game companies can get away with it - Poser/DS cannot. This shift to mobile affects Poser and DS in multiple ways - primarily, it means less real-estate for a 'desktop' view. Sure, I can Miracast my 17" laptop screen onto my titanic 4K LED television screen and have all the real-estate on the planet to play with, but I'm fairly sure my wife would object to my interrupting her favorite TV shows and movies by doing so ;)
So - with the typical user these days having a 15" laptop, that's pretty much what you have to shoot for. It's not a bad environment to work with (my previous laptop, a 15" 2012-era MacBook Pro, served just fine as a CG workstation), so your baseline specs are still going to be somewhat lower than usual, and, more importantly, your UI/UX is going to have to adapt to these realities as well.