[Bf-committers] Current state of Blender's user experience (Ton Roosendaal) (Sybren A. St?vel) (Ton Roosendaal)

[Joe Eagar]

> I often get mails from professionals who say "nice job on Blender, but..."
> and then come with a list of favourite Maya or Max features. This might be
> an acceptable consumer attitude towards commercial software, but it's very
> not helpful for a public open source project. Dynamics here work
> differently, it's not based on market shares or consumer satisfaction, it's
> based one time and energy - contributions.

Oh really?  Care to explain?  I find such feedback incredibly helpful.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking that if a user wants
something, he should get it now.

That's just silly.  I'm perfectly happy to take a commercial user's
input, and factor it into my medium and long-term thinking.  An
example of that is superknife, which I designed as a hybrid of two
different commercial package's knife tools.  It took years for BMesh
to reach a state where I could implement it.  Geoffrey Bantle thought
the same way, which is why the BMesh data structure he designed is so
flexible and yet simple to work with; it's meant to cover all an
enormous number of use cases (except cad, which requires holes in
polygons; both of us were too intimidated to attempt it at the time).
We loved getting ideas from commercial software and the users of that
software.

Of course, given the human tendency to turn every public conversation
into a flame war over "which is normatively better, my tribe--erm, I
mean app--or yours?", most of these conversations happened
semi-privately on IRC or through email, and occasionally the main
developers list.

I love feedback.  Feedback is wonderful.  Software development is an
incredibly complicated constrained optimization process.  Feedback
helps you prioritize goals.  It doesn't have to be implemented
immediately; in fact it can take years, and I think that's okay.  I'd
much rather have knowledge I cannot act on now, then live in ignorance
until I have the means to implement said knowledge.  When I finally do
implement it, I'll have had years to think about it.

Cheers,
Joe

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 6:34 AM, Thomas Dinges <blender at dingto.org> wrote:
> It's Ton, not Tom. ;)
>
> Am 26.04.2016 um 15:23 schrieb David Ballesteros:
>> Hi Sybren,
>>
>> It's simply crossed to me as a too much white & black answer, nothing else.
>> I just read Tom new answer and I understand his original answer.
>> So all is good.
>>
>>> You don't appear like an avid hater, so why do you feel he is addressing
>> you?
>>> Cheers,
>>> --
>>> Sybren A. St?vel
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Hi Tom,
>>
>> Thanks for the welcome and the answer.
>> Now I understand much better your points.
>>
>> I'm very glad to read you're open to suggestions form "commercial" software
>> users.
>>
>> A simple argument can be used to those users that want feature X in Blender
>> is asking them how many features suggested by them got implemented on their
>> commercial X software. ;) I know several of mine were completly ignored in
>> LW and Modo :D
>>
>>> My expectation was that we could use the dynamics of the 2.8 project to
>> include that target.
>>> But I'm still not convinced we are ready for it now. The project is too
>> complicated, with too
>>> many inactive stakeholders and not enough active contributors. But we
>> make progress here...
>>
>> I read the document you attached yesterday, and I'm very glad to see where
>> is going, and I guess you mean it was for the 2.8 branch and still under
>> disscusion if it oges or not?.
>>
>> I liked the consolidation explained area by area, that will really
>> streamline Blender and make it even better.
>>
>> I still have a lot to read on Blender internals to even know where to start
>> to touch without breaking anything :) I'll try to do my best.
>>
>> To the OP (Daniel):
>> I read that reddit thread, and I think better ignore it. Too much energy
>> spent in a discussion that doesn't take anywhere.
>>
>> Cheers
>> David.
>>
>> Message: 6
>>> Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 11:17:51 +0200
>>> From: Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Current state of Blender's user
>>>         experience (Ton Roosendaal)
>>> To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
>>> Message-ID: <667E96F1-D629-4E04-9389-774609ED12A8 at blender.org>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>>>
>>> Hi David,
>>>
>>> Thanks for sharing, I just addressed the Blender haters out there, not
>>> users of other 3d tools.
>>>
>>> It is great that there are so many people involved with our projects who
>>> used (or still use) commercial 3d software as well. We can learn from them,
>>> especially because they were curious enough to invest time to figure out
>>> how to use Blender, or what makes Blender good (enough to use) as well.
>>>
>>> So please feel welcome to hangout, help developers with their work or
>>> contribute code.
>>>
>>> I often get mails from professionals who say "nice job on Blender, but..."
>>> and then come with a list of favourite Maya or Max features. This might be
>>> an acceptable consumer attitude towards commercial software, but it's very
>>> not helpful for a public open source project. Dynamics here work
>>> differently, it's not based on market shares or consumer satisfaction, it's
>>> based one time and energy - contributions.
>>>
>>> It's also a misconception to think we didn't code awesome feature X or Y
>>> because we didn't know it existed, or didn't know it was so important.
>>> There's just not enough developers to contribute.
>>>
>>> So: how do we get studios or professionals organise Blender projects to
>>> handle their favourite topics? I always tell them they're welcome, with
>>> limited success. I learned that getting involved with FLOSS is not in their
>>> DNA really. First of all it takes (a lot of) time, which is expensive for
>>> pros. Second we cannot give a hard guarantee in advance that things will
>>> work as planned or get accepted in releases. And third: corporate practices
>>> is still based on secrecy and non-disclosure, participating in a public
>>> project is regarded as a loss of competitive advantage. That is changing
>>> (ILM, Pixar, etc), but hardly in small/medium sized companies.
>>>
>>> Because it could be so easy. If just 20 Maya/Max subscribers would decide
>>> to invest in Blender what they'd give to Autodesk, they could hire a
>>> developer to work for them full time - to fix mouse/keyboard input mapping
>>> and configurability for example, snapping tools, and other very useful
>>> projects.
>>>
>>> My expectation was that we could use the dynamics of the 2.8 project to
>>> include that target. But I'm still not convinced we are ready for it now.
>>> The project is too complicated, with too many inactive stakeholders and not
>>> enough active contributors. But we make progress here...
>>>
>>> -Ton-
>>>
>>>
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