CompuServe Thread

Dave, among the programs we published were adventure games. Those take considerably more than 10 minutes to master. I was expected to know all possible solutions and mistakes and dead ends and red herrings a game player could find in those as well. We had at least several hundred such games over the years. Then there were the accounting programs, the programming languages (both compilers and interpreters, as well as add-ons to existing languages), etc. Saying that Softdisk programs took 10 minutes to learn is a gross over- generalization. It's true of most of the arcade games, maybe, and perhaps a few of the simpler utilities, but that's about it. How could I need more support than I have already? Simple. Time. When we have a project almost finished, and a deadline looms that afternoon for a major client to do a major television ad that they have already paid for the broadcast time for, and 3D Studio ups and crashes or fails to perform a documented function for some reason — well, let's just say that the client doesn't particularly appreciate the excuse, "We would have had it on time but the software we use isn't working right and the dealer didn't know the answer and we can't call AutoDesk directly and we expect to have an answer by modem maybe tomorrow or at least by the end of this week." Nope. Doesn't work that way. In this business, when we need an answer, we need it IMMEDIATELY. Compuserve can't do that. Phones connected to real human beings can. Actual example: there is a bug in 3DSr2.01a that isn't in 3DSr2.0, in rendering flat mirror autoreflections. The edges, including the internal ones (the ones which have been marked "invisible"), of ALL the faces in the autoreflecting area, become visible. The only solution is to render the project in release 2.0 instead — not practical if you bought 2.01a in the first place, or if your project also needs 2.01a-specific features such as FLARE.IXP (granted, you can work around this by doing the Video Post pass separate from the rendering, but that's time-wasting) or the Decal Map Alpha-Blending facility (no workaround possible that I know of), let alone how much slower 2.0 is. But we didn't need any of those features. We could have rendered in 2.0 just fine, had we known that that was what was causing it. BUT … This bug is not mentioned anywhere in the 2.01a addendum documentation. Nor did our dealer know about it. The only way we found out was through Compuserve, and by that time it was too late. We lost the account. Had we been able to call a tech support guy that day, we would have been able to save the account. THAT is why phone support is a necessity, and while Compuserve is a great supplement, as is dealer support, they should be just that — SUPPLEMENTS. NOT the whole support. I'll even go so far as to say this: if we had known at the time we bought 3DS that there was no direct support available, we probably would not have bought it. We probably would have bought some competing product which may not have been as powerful, but which provided support.