my guess as to release date, from Dan's comment above. late 2004. he does say early stages of development. pointing up at Dan Farr's comment where he says very early stages of development. see?! see?! if we swamp them with requests we start setting ourselves up for another big letdown. ( gods would love to have lots of little features, but the more they try to get in for first release, either the longer before release, or the worse the condition of the coding. ) my second biggest want besides linux is NO TRACKBALL CONTROLS...leave that for the toy programs. really bad useless controls in my opinion. lightwave, max, maya, ttruespace don't have trackballs, and those are concidered " professional modelling / animation " apps.