Word of advice to any Mac OS 9 user looking to upgrade to Carrara 2.0, it seems awfully buggy running under OS 9.2.2. It runs grate under OS X though. I get a feeling they worked harder to stabilize and optimize it for OS X than 9. It will run under 9 but it crashes just as much as the Metacreations version did. I was so disappointed because I had a dead line to meet and I started working on a project under 9.2.2, after taking my files home and working with them under OS X, it is a big difference. Open GL works great and it doesn't crash with every command like on OS 9. I did meet my deadline and I am super happy that Carrara runs much better on OS X than OS 9.2.2.
It could be an extensions conflict on my computer. I guess I would have to test it further but my initial feeling on this is I would update to OS X before updating to Carrara 2.0 or weight for a patch to be released before upgrading to version 2.0.
I just thought that Mac users would like to know. Has any body else experienced this too?

It is so hard to tell with OS9 if it really is an app problem or if it is a OS problem. 9 is so flaky when it comes to that. I would say that most "application" problems are actually caused by the system or a conflict. As for 1.1 of Carrara I see no difference between it and 2.0 as far as stability goes under 9. That is a good thing as 1.1 rarely if ever crashed for me. I would recommend going over your OS9 system and checking for conflicts, bad fonts, corruption, etc... -Paul

I am trying out the Carrara 2.0 Demo on OS9, and my results are the same. I put it right into OpenGL mode, which I expect to use, and it bombs like mad dumping random garbage all over the active window, like the picture above shows. I got this lovely image by trying to go into the modeller and make a simple spline object. The modeler seems 100% incompatible with the OpenGL previewing. I'm using a g4/450 with an AGP ATI Rage128 card. This is a stock apple configuration. OS 9.2.2. -Adam

I know what you mean about OS 9, put my system has been running very well. I work in a Pre-press Department for a Service Bureau, so I am dealing with all sorts of files and software. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I started a project here at work. Every time I would bring a texture map from Photoshop to Carrara the program would flip. This used to happen to me with the original Carrara, and what's even stranger is that Carrara 1.1 runs very well on this machine. So that's what led me to believe that the upgrade was not running all that well under 9.0. I had some problems with Open GL under 9.0 too, that don't seem to show up under OS X. My hole screen goes black if I turn some settings on.

Hmm... Well not that it is any consulation but Apple has officially buried OS9. They still support it but, I doubt they will ever have another release unless it is to update a small driver or something. OSX is the future of Apple and its users. I hate to say this since I still look at OSX with some criticism. But it is far more stable, and most of the Major apps now work natively: PhotoShop 7, Go Live 6, Macromedia MX products, Adobe Illustrator, In design, Carrara 2, MS Office v.X, Apple Works, Roxio Toast, Final Cut Pro, iTunes, iMovie, Real Basic, Bryce 5, Vue 4, basically all Instant Messengers, Quicken 2002. Just to name a few MAJOR apps that suppot it anyway. So most of the apps that people use on a day to day basis are carbonized. The rest will either catch up or drop Mac support all together. -Paul

Thanks for the info. OSX is the future for the Mac OS but, it will probably be anoter year or more beore most current Mac users will adopt it. I hope Eovia can straighten the OS9 & Windows problems with OpenGl.

Agreed! OS 9 is far from dead and gone, and optimizing for X is no excuse for releasing beta-quality software to OS 9 users.

Apple may stop developing 9, but software vendors haven't stopped producing software for it, and the fact is that a lot more people are using 8.6 thru 9.1 right now than are using OS X. This is partly because of people hesistant to upgrade their 'ain't broke why fix it' OS 9 systems, and partly because of the huge user base of 601, 603 and 604 machines that cannot even use X (not without hacking the installer and unstable results anyways). Even my 1996 vintage highly-upgradable Power Mac 8500 with 500MHz G3 card is not officially supported by X. But it's perfectly happy running 9.1. There are an awful lot of people who have upgraded their 7300-9600 series macs to G3 or G4 cards that are plenty fast, just not able to use OS X.

Note also that although most of the major software vendors have upgraded their products to OS X native (Adobe, Macromedia MX etc..), they are carbonized, which means they are intended to run perfectly on OS 9 with CarbonLib. In other words, all major mac software vendors are still supporting OS 9, and they know they have to do this to sell their quota.

Lastly, there are some major apps from major vendors that are not OS X native in any way yet. I'm thinking of Macromedia Director 8.5, Digidesign Pro Tools 5 and Logic Audio Platinum 5. These are all industry-leading, thousand-dollar applications that are the core elements of multimedia and music studios alike. I work professionally for a Director/Shockwave-based multimedia firm, and we can't even consider switching to X until director MX is released and supporting it. Well, not just supporting it but proven stable on it, enough that we can trust it to run kiosk software.

At home I run 10.1.5 most of the time, but since I still use the 3 applications in bold type above + Poser 4.0.3, I have to boot in 9.2.2 a lot. Poser use is why I'm most upset about Carrara 2.0 for OS 9. I go back and forth from Poser to Carrara, and since Poser's OS 9-only, I'm going to Carrara in OS 9 for convenience of staying in 9. -Adam

Ageed indeed! Problem is, the average Mac home/hobby user "upgrades" to a new OS when they buy a new machine. That is around three+ years so we have about 2 years to go before OSX is commonplace for Carrara's intended user base. In the meantime, it may be a problem with the drivers for the video cards & not Carrara or openGl. ATI has released new drivers here: http://download.ati.com/drivers/radeon-0206.html#macos9

I suspect Carrara. The hideous garbled screenshot I posted above was taken on my G4/450 at work, which had 9.2.2 clean installed to a reformatted drive on Friday. It's in a stock configuration, with the most current drivers for the ATI Rage128 Pro card it has. I've just now reproduced this problem on my home macs also, which includes an 8500/G3/500 with a Rage128 PCI card and OS 9.1. and also a G4/800 system with a Radeon 7500 AGP. Again, nothing on either of these machines to indicate OpenGL problems outside of Carrara. Shockwave 3D uses OpenGL and is fine, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein also runs flawlessly on both these computers. I'm 99.999% sure this issue is localized to Carrara. -Adam

I agree. That's way I posted the initial message since I know that there is still a huge demand for OS 9x. I am personally enjoing OS X very happily and I am pleased to say that Carrara seams to be working very well under OS X, put in my experience it has proven to be extremely unstable on OS 9. From the response I a am getting from you guy's I would say that I am not alone on this. In my case it is not a big deal, but I can sure understand how this could mean a lot of trouble for others. One good thing that comes to mind is that the different platform versions of Carrara are independent from each other, and I would think that fixing the Widows and OS 9 versions should not be very hard, as oppose to optimizing & stabilizing one single version for OS 9 and OS X.

The versions are not too independent from each other. You can bet that 90+% of the code is the same set of classes shared by mac and windows. The only differences would be in the classes that handle truly OS-specific stuff. Most application programming can be done in a fairly generalized, platform-independent way, then compiled separately for each platform. The different versions are really made at the linking and compiling level, rather than at the source code level. For the OS X and OS 9 versions... they're even less different. The OS 9 version is probably the OS X version tweaked to use carbonLib. The bugs we're seeing may just be an oversight, like a piece of code that works in OS X but didn't translate well in 9. I'd like to think Carrara 2.1 irons this out, now that it's been brought to light. -Adam

Everyone seems to be missing the point of carbonized apps. The Carbon API exists so that an application can be programmed once. When it is compiled, it will run native on OSX or on OS9 with CarbonLib installed. Now I say this because C2 is carbonized, so the same app runs on either system. I don't think they spent their time optimizing for OSX while ignoring OS9. Their installed user base for Mac OS were OS 8.x-9.x users, so they obviousley would need to cater to the majority. The stability and performance you see in C2 is more a result of the OS then it is the programming, as they are the same program. This is why I think most users who rely on their computers for work should switch to OSX as soon as they can, because they will have far more up time, and be far more productive. terminusnord mentioned having to start in OS9 to use Poser and then end up using C2 in OS 9. This is not necessary at all, I run Poser in Classic mode under X and C2 under X at the same time, no problem at all. Poser 4.03 runs quite well under classic, most people will see little difference in performance. I do agree that OS 9 is not dead from a user stand point. But from an Apple position it is DEAD, they publically buried it at the WWDC conference in May. Coming from someone who has written apps for OS9/X, this is a good thing as there are so many gotchas with OS9 that it can be a support nightmare. Remember that OS9.x still is based off the original Mac OS released in 1984. Not that this is a bad thing, as there are still many features from OS9 that I would love to see in a new release, (Pop-Up Folders, Apple Menu, Better contexual menu support, spring loaded folders (10.2!) and many other little niceities) just a fact and a cause of stability/app problems. As for Eovia releasing Beta-Quality software, this just is not a fair statement. I bought Carrara1 when it was first released and owned by MetaCreations. They admitted it was rushed and not up to par. Eovia fixed that with the release of 1.1. 2.0 is built from that, and so far has yet to cause me a crash. More then I can say for the Meta version that crashed frequently. This is just life with a new .0 release. There is no way of knowing all the bugs and little glitches that result from all the differing system configurations, until the software is released and used by the masses. Also OSX will be common place alot faster then 2 years from now. It has already made huge inroads, in the last year, since 10.1 was released last September. The 10.2(tenative) release will also blow your minds as it is much faster and has many added features to make the Mac, that we all love, even more fun to use, but I can't talk about that ;-) Bottom line is don't be afraid to make a change. You can always boot into OS9 if you need to, after installing X. I agree that alot of Mac users are getting an OS update only when they buy a new computer, but that is your typical less-then-computer-savy home user and NOT the people that buy Carrara or other 3D apps. Those people are missing out on all the fun and frustration less computing that we take for granted. -Paul

Also you can turn off OpenGL in the interactive rendering prefs and still get the same performance you are used to in 1.1's OpenGL implementation. In 1.x OpenGL for Mac provided very little, if any, difference from the Softare setting! So in this case you won't be missing out on anything, it will be exactley like 1.x. I know this is no consulation, but it is a temporary work around. :-) -Paul

PAGzone:
I agree with you on every thing but there is some other issues with Carrara and OS 9 that where not there in 1.1. aside from the Open GL issue. In my experience the software crashes importing a texture map almost every time. This would be a show stopper for me if it wasn't that OS X is not in my future, it's in my present. I do agree that people who seek stability are way better off in OS X, put hardly every body has the resources to upgrade, since you almost need a G-4 to really use OS X to it's fullest. What I believe is that there are some minor code adjustments that have to be made for Carrara to run right on OS 9. I don't even believe that it's going to take a long time for Eovia to fix this. But it does need attention. To just suggest to people having problems to go get a compatible system and run Carrara under OS X is not realistic. Like I said I do agree with what you say about the adoption of OS X. Macworld had a survey to see how many of it's readers where using OS X and it was already something like 62%. So this is indicative that there is a lot of people giving up OS 9, but don't forget that there are still vital pieces missing from OS X. If I was to update my computer at work to OS X, I would be rendered obsolete, there is no print drivers out for our image setter and QuarkXpress is not yet Carbonized. May be Jaguar will fix the driver issue. For Quark I will just have to sit tight and weight.

PAGzone, my experiece varies on a couple of points. On my G4/800 Poser renders scenes 4-6 times faster under 9.2.2 than in Classic. This is a not a subtle difference! I did a test figure render in 9.2.2 that took 2:30, but in Classic mode it was still chugging away after 10 minutes!! There is simply no way I can work productively in Poser 4.0.3 in Classic mode. I can't explain the speed discrepancy, but it's not unique to my system, others here have reported getting the same results on their G4 machines. I'm also not sold on Carrara 1.1 being bug free. It certainly fixed some bugs of 1.0, but it introduced a handful of new ones that are as bad or worse. I consistantly get "Render Failed" errors trying to render out series of pict or psd animations, and parts of the interface that worked in 1.0 are broken in 1.1--when I click on the little square that is supposed to toggle between the different views, my window always goes blank. My workaround is to use the camera view pull-down menu, which is slower to do. -Adam

Very good points. You are absolutley correct about OSX needing a G4, even though Apple claims a G3 is fine, it really is not. 1.1 is not bug free, I don't think there exists an application that can be bug free, humans are too imperfect. I agree, upgrading to OSX is worth it only if you have the hardware to run it. As for Poser 4, Wow those are some big diferences. I have a Dual-Processor G4, so this helps classic be a little speedier as OSX can allocate a processor to that thread. But it is still by no means as good as native OS9. I also don't use Poser for rendering, that is what I have Carrara for! ;-) Now if only they would add a plugin like what e-on software is doing with Vue4 that lets you host complete Poser Scenes in Carrara with animations. I even like Vue4's ability to open .pz3 files complete, no need to tweak textures. Are you reading DCG, Eric? An Anything Pose plugin would sure be great!! I would pay $59 for that no problem! cheers, Paul

Very good points. You are absolutley correct about OSX needing a G4, even though Apple claims a G3 is fine, it really is not. 1.1 is not bug free, I don't think there exists an application that can be bug free, humans are too imperfect. I agree, upgrading to OSX is worth it only if you have the hardware to run it. As for Poser 4, Wow those are some big diferences. I have a Dual-Processor G4, so this helps classic be a little speedier as OSX can allocate a processor to that thread. But it is still by no means as good as native OS9. I also don't use Poser for rendering, that is what I have Carrara for! ;-) Now if only they would add a plugin like what e-on software is doing with Vue4 that lets you host complete Poser Scenes in Carrara with animations. I even like Vue4's ability to open .pz3 files complete, no need to tweak textures. Are you reading DCG, Eric? An Anything Pose plugin would sure be great!! I would pay $59 for that no problem! cheers, Paul