I just read an oldish message by a man who used to be a programmer for Metacreations. He complained that there are bugs in Poser etc because the programmers don't have time to properly debug their programs because of their management wanting stuff out for release in impossibly quick times - that old fault of factory etc managements from the begining. What is the chance of us getting the source forms of Poser and Bryce?, so that "many hands can make light work" of debugging and developing it as with the Gnu program and compiler packages (http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/), and the JPG graphics format (via an IJG mailing list jpeg-l@ijg.org, administrivia to majordomo@ijg.org). Judging by complaints about "C exceptions", Poser (and therefore perhaps Bryce) are likely in easily understandable C or C++, and not in Basic like I suspect that the spreadsheeting Excel is. (Ye catfish, I pity anyone who has to debug and improve a program in Basic which is a big as Excel!)

Well, assuming we can get source ;-) ;-) ;-) Only problem with the GNU effort is that the development process for Poser is based on a very large and powerful class library from MertoWerks (part of the CodeWarrior compiler package). The beautiful thing about this is that this library gives you everything, GUI building tools, file IO, even multithreading (that's how RayDream supports multiple processors on both Mac and Windows). Development at MC is mainly on the Mac, then the Windows version is tweeked into operation, but the CodeWarrior approach lets you go either way. GNU on Windows (Either Cygwin or ECGS) is still a bit iffy, and there's just no truely major league, serious cross platform library (although wX isn't bad, and it does Linux, too). GNU on Mac is real iffy. So the team has three alternatives: 1) Rewrite everything in wX for GNU, which is a whole lot of work, and will likely yield a buggy finished product. 2) Purchase Codewarrior for everyone involved in the distributed development. This is likely to be expensive. 3) Write a wrapper class library to adapt CodeWarrior calls to another class library (again, probably wX). This would be a fairly large effort. The neat thing is that many of us could be hammering away at it on our GNU/wX setups, writing code for a MetroWerks library which we don't actually have, and debugging using the translation layer. Then, for a final release, we recompile on one system with real MetroWorks CodeWarrior. (Although we use the GNU/wX for our Linux release). Well, that's far enough over the rainbow for one night. Ciao! Joe

wiz wrote "... GNU on Windows (Either Cygwin or ECGS) is still a bit iffy ... I was not specifically wanting Poser to be transferred to Gnu C for Windows or whwtever it is called. It could stay in Visual C or Borland C or whatever it is written in.

No, but you did want a large, distributed project similar to how the GNU compilers or ijg (which didn't develope JPEG itself, just a toolset) were developed. What made these projects work was the low cost to get into the game (free compiler) etc. Poser was written in CodeWarrior, and, at $500 / seat, I doubt we'll have a large number of people stepping up to this. Additionally, the development method was "develop on Mac, port to Windows". Which means we'll have to quickly shift to "develop on Windows (or Linux) and port to Mac, since Mac programmers only account for about 8% of all software developers.