[Uni-verse] Fixing a Verse version for the Uni-Verse project

[Eskil Steenberg]

Hi

The Uni verse project is about connecting things. That is what we have
gotten money for, none of the deliverables or work packages really matter,
it’s all about connecting things. the deliverables and work packages are
there to support the vision, if they don’t they need to be changed or they
need to go. If you read the Uni-verse application you get that. Somehow
this project got off track, and people started to think that the parts
where more important then the big idea. I know I get it, I know the people
i work with at KTH get it, and i know Ton gets it. That is why he has been
trying to push for focusing more on verse and how to connect things to it,
and that is why he has tried to get everyone to understand that in order
for this to happen we need to be at Siggraph, we need to make more
contacts with others. When he talks about a new direction for the
marketing it’s because he understands the problems the project faces.

And yes, EU got it as well. They clearly said that we should focus more on
verse, we should make sure that everything we do around verse helps verse,
we should work harder and spend more efforts connecting existing industry
standard tools to verse, And that we should work closer to the market and
have a clear plan for how this technology should benefit the industry. I
don’t want to defend the project against the criticism we got from the
reviewers, i want to embrace it. EU doesn’t want us to make them happy,
they what us to make the industry happy.

If all this project was about as using verse to do something specific,
well then you might want to lock down a specific verse version, but that’s
not what we are doing. If you want to do something beyond this project, if
you want the software to survive longer, if you want to build community
then detaching form verse is a disaster. Sure there are lots of things we
can do to make it simpler, but we are looking to be effective too. saying
that the project doesn’t care what version other are running and don’t mind
being incompatible is a move in the wrong direction, and we need to start
moving in the right direction.

I think we should make real changes, and i want us to make the changes so
we better can reach our goal. I think that sending back a defensive
mail to the EU is wrong. They said it clearly, next time around if there
are not real changes to the way the project is directed they are inclined
to shut it down. For some reason there hasn’t been any talk about changes
and the project has instead chosen to dig it self down under reports.

I suggest a list of changes, to make this project do what it was meant to
do:

- Spend more resources on Maya and Max plugins. Both these have huge
potential (probably better then anything else in the project), but need
more work. <3 months each>

- Add a plugin for XSI, use Ample and know-how form the Maya And Max
Plugins. The last peace of the big 3 applications.<6 months>

- Scrap one or both of the rendering engines. They aren’t too useful,
especially not running on not wide spread hardware.

- Replace rendering engines with RIB exporter. Tiny amount of work, a huge
market, we could compete with "Renderman to Maya" and "Renderman to
max"<1-2 months>

- Spend time on creating more plugins for Purple. We could easily get
adoption of the blender coder community to grab on to this project if there
was something more demoable <4-6 months>

- Write a new UI for Purple. Making Purple look like Blender would give
us a bigger blender-purple community <1 year using blender stuff>

- Scrap Radiosity module. Not use full for the goal of the project.

- Multi threaded server should be a journaling server instead, with disk
caching. multi treading hard with current architecture, content management
functionality more useful for our users.

- First make sure audio system works well for collaborative voice over IP
use then focus on acoustics.

- investigate writing plugins for audio applications such as wavelab,
cooledit and others. Easy way of bringing in existing sound application
communities to us.

- investigate writing plugins for architect tools. If we are serious
about architecture we should write plugins for the tools they use to
build their models.

- more performance tuning on verse. I guess already in progress<6 months>

- move reduction work over to Audio team. Current implementation doesn’t
help enough the audio team, the audio team should get resources to develop
their own audio centric reduction.

- write plugins for 2d tools photoshop and Shake. Again easy to do huge
user bases.

- Make Siggraph 2006 nr 1 marketing opportunity with booth. Give Blender
the resources to set this up.

These changes have the objective of building a community around or project
and to infiltrate the user communities of the these industry standard
applications. Invite the companies behind these applications and make
their competitors want to connect as well.

E