iGame3D status 062204

Tue Jun 22 04:44:05 EDT 2004

I couldn't crash your test stack on windows but there are many
issues with menus and popup menus. I added some comments too the
the bugzilla. 

By far the weirdest bug is trying to access the 
test4 menu, it makes the menu pop up anywhere on the IDE! 
But it's half understandable since you have a mousedown 
event handler within the menu button... ;)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: use-revolution-bounces at lists.runrev.com
> [mailto:use-revolution-bounces at lists.runrev.com]On Behalf Of william
> griffin
> Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 07:24
> To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> Cc: capellan2000 at yahoo.com; Tobias Opfermann
> Subject: Re: iGame3D status 062204
> 
> 
> >
> > 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 documentations but looks like they do not publish it.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
> 
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