iGame3D status 062204

Tue Jun 22 01:23:33 EDT 2004

>
> Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 08:09:29 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Alejandro Tejada <capellan2000 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: What happens with igame3d?
> Does anyone knows happens to http://www.igame3d.com
>
> The OpenGL programming system that they implemented
> shows a lot of possibilities, but it has vanished
> from their site. I was expecting for detailed
> documentations but looks like they do not publish it.
>
> When we could have a OpenGL canvas in RR?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> al
>

Alejandro,
Thanks for your interest.  I don't have good news.

May 18 was the two year anniversary of our work on this project.
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the first Metacard built  
release.
The website was supposed to be revamped to reflect these events,
read along to find out why the site is now a dead zone.

For eleven months your name in particular was on my mind to accomplish  
things with iGame3D that seemed elusive to my mathmetically limited  
mind, your various vector projects have inspired some interesting   
iGame3D stacks in the past year.

I had my heart set on Judy Perry and her class to be the initial  
"student body" that
would help develop the roadmap of high level 3D application design  
education.
The licensing logistics of that concept were a bit confusing of course.

It was my intent to get a working stack to someone with the ability to  
educate the masses when the time was right, with the features/UI well  
formed. At the beginning of May I was in the middle of the fourth GUI  
rework, seeking the perfect balance of function and form

Providing a fully working and user friendly stack was priority number  
one.
I had no intention of licensing out a confusing half finished product.

It is now eleven months since we licensed Revolution.
This is the iGame3D Feature list as of April 2004
http://www.igame3d.com/features.html

Easily a half dozen or more other features were added since that time,
including shader support, a method of 3D graphing, a new proprietary
model format, a new model animation method, drawing directly into a Rev  
wind (very slow), keyframe-like timeline abilities, anti-aliasing,  
alpha rendering....
I've lost count actually.

The iGame3D stack, was going to be the template for educating users in  
the use of iGame3D's extensive features. Writing documentation is not  
the driving force of this project, in fact it tends to make us brain  
dead afterwards.

  iGame3D exists because we needed a tool for making games that doesn't  
exist on the Mac. Mac users in general were to be the secondary  
beneficiaries  beneficiaries of the fulfillment of our personal life  
long goal. Rev users were to get access to a great external in the  
process of those primary motivators.

After eleven months of working non stop on this product, it has been
driven into the ground by the faulty IDE we were "rented".

The iGame3D stack has been pretty much destroyed by Bugzilla Bug 1655
http://www.runrev.com/revolution/developers/bugdatabase/show_bug.cgi? 
id=1655

Possibly any one of the other 300 or so bugs in the Rev IDE are also  
culprits.

Pop-up buttons stopped working.
They sometimes crashed the application on mousedown.
Replacing pop-ups with tabbed groups makes an unsightly cluttered  
interface.
Too many buttons was complaint number one of the metacard version.

To circumvent that problem, pop ups were removed from stacks, UI  
re-designed,  and extensive menus with submenus were painstakingly  
developed but these Menu bar menu items vanish.

  I get menus with random amounts of content, or menus with nothing at  
all in them, even though they show up 100% in menuBuilder.
This breaks opening levels, importing/exporting models, accesing two  
dozen or more mesh editing commands, and destroys all functionality of  
the iGame3D console.

Revs UI menu items vanish, therefore no saving, no opening stacks,  and  
90% of the other controls under the REV menus become non existant. This  
problem has been frustratingly random, several times, across several  
months I thought the bug had been vanquished only to find myself  
un-able to save after extensive optimizations and bug fixes. There one  
minute, gone the next.

When reverting to Metacard, the menus functioned perfectly but other  
elements of the iGame3D external no longer functioned, and eventually  
Metacard crashed while doing nothing at all.

Having switched from Metacard eleven months ago (after only using the  
demo for less than 2 months) I'm too unfamiliar with it to even begin  
to guess where in the 3,000+ lines of script to start looking for a  
fix. Especially if it crashes while trying to figure this out.

Instead of getting any help on bug 1655, I received "your license has  
expired, pay up for the latest version". Pay for a version which i've  
already found out contains the same bugs? Less than twelve months from  
licensing the first broken version?
Are they serious?

We don't have an income to feed Runtime, or  to tempt others to work on  
the project with the dedication it requires, and I can't accept the  
possibility of taking money from people only to answer support  
questions with "it is a known Rev bug wait twelve months, upgrade and  
then continue your project".

At the beginning of May, faced with these bugs, we were going to forgo  
all hopes of licensing the external and stack, and concentrate on our  
primary goal of making games using the buggy version at hand.

Scott Rossi then contracted us for some of the extended features listed  
earlier.
He is currently the only license holder, and our ability to provide the  
mind blowing amount of features and documentation required is fairly  
well hindered by Revs bugs.
He doesn't have the 8,12 ,16 to 20 hours a day that I've put into the  
original project.
His success, I feel, is our only measure of how we proceed to service  
the rest of the Revolution community, if at all.

We are currently looking into realBasic as a solution, but face the  
unwelcome
task of recreating nearly a years worth of work in an unfamiliar  
environment, followed
by the dull and daunting task of documentation, all within the realm of  
an unknown market, that already has a 3D environment at its disposal at  
IDE purchase time.

I've been tempted to try a donation drive to make the external  
available to everyone, as is, a wide open license. Blender was able to  
raise $50,000 this way to open source their hideous, albeit powerfu,l  
product source. I'm not sure what the rev market will bear, and if  
sufficient funds failed to be raised, I'm afraid everyone might lose in  
the end. We certainly can't give away two years of our lives and a  
potentially lifetime investment opportunity for nothing.

At this time, I'm too burned out to clearly see the light at the end of  
the tunnel.
I can just barely express the emotional toll this situation has taken  
on me.
I'm waiting for a divine spark of inspiration to overcome the current  
obstacles.
Everything has a purpose, right?

Well, thats the story to date.
Thanks again for your interest.

Sincerely,
Bill Griffin
Team iGame3D
bill at igame3d.com