# r4 paranoia
Robert, Paul et al.
I was there, I asked Gary privately. It was my understanding when Gary told
ME that the R4 was rushed to release in September to stay competitive. R4 will
include the IK moduiles and the scripting language and the other 4 "plug-ins"
you mentioned for the R3 owener's upgrade of $295. I wasn't confused at all by
his statement. Seems to me those who were not there are speculating, and
conjecturing, as to what this means. I see it as an evolvement of 3DS to a
"shell" with some basic "plug-ins" (USED to be called IPAS) that is advancing
to a more robust open architecture for third party development.
One thing that all of you are possivbly loosing sight of is with open
architecture we just might have more than one IK plug-in to choose from for an
effect. We might get several from different competitive developers as well as
a basic one from Yost that comes standard just like we have more than one word
processor in windows to buy extra besides the Write program that comes with
Windows. Gary did demo the metaballs plug-in from Spain and clearly stated
that this was not part of the r4 package but had just arrived for him to look
at. It was also my understanding that some of the third party (additional $)
plug-ins may need the standard IK plug-in within r4 to even function.
I did not find any of the specific announcements confusing at all, other than
the surprise that Autodesk was changing their 18 month release policy. I think
I personally will start looking at 3DS as an operating environment for
"plug-ins" and then I will be able to deal with it better.
I think your responses have been right on target Robert and it seems to me that
all the conjecture is what's confusing others.