CompuServe Messages

Then with all due respect to Autodesk, that's a nonsensical policy. The whole point of the three-level version numbering system is that bug fixes change only the second digit after the decimal point (3.01, etc.), MINOR IMPROVEMENTS (including new features visible in the UI) would change the first digit after the decimal point (3.1, etc.), and major revamps would change the digit to the left of the decimal point (4.0, etc.). This is the way it is in the entire rest of the computer software industry. For instance, Aldus Pagemaker 4.2 (for the Macintosh) added the whole concept of Aldus Additions, which meant adding a whole new heirarchical pull-down menu to 4.0 which lacked that feature entirely. Yet that change wasn't considered major enough to call it 5.0. I can give you many other similar examples from the likes of Lotus, WordPerfect, Adobe, Borland, and even Almighty Microsoft (see MS-DOS 6.2 or Windows 3.1?), and even from direct competitors to both Autodesk and the Yost Group. If it's good enough for them. . . . Maybe you haven't realized just how enormously difficult it is to make a change in 3DS.SET for one job when you have a rendering farm. You have to make the change on EVERY SINGLE MACHINE that will have anything to do with that project! One at a time. These have to be on the LOCAL DRIVES of the machines in question, too, so there is no way to automate it over the network. Our rendering farm is I dare say like many others in that we don't have a keyboard and monitor hooked to each individual machine. (I have AUTOEXEC.BAT set up to put the machines into Slave mode on bootup, synchronizing the clock to the network included, requiring no keypresses whatsoever in the process.) This means that for each machine, we have to hook up a keyboard and monitor, bring down Slave mode, make the change, restart Slave mode, disconnect the monitor and keyboard, hook it to the next machine, and so on. (Yes, we could get a massive switch box, but why should we pay so much extra because Autodesk has such a nonsensical policy and for no other reason?) This is just too much to have to do to render ONE PROJECT, and then we'd have to REPEAT the process to change it BACK! And this still ignores the question of how to have BOTH transparencies in the same scenes! Autodesk wants us to go through all of this just because THEY don't want to make changes visible in the UI (in other words, any sort of new feature whatsoever that is at all usable to the average user) between major left of the decimal point version revamps? Perhaps this deserves a rethink.