Woah... What happenned?

Pentagular Dark · August 10, 2011, 01:34:49 AM

This has happened to a lot of cool programs/games (i.e. Burning sand(2)/Wxsand/Creatures?).
It's this great idea everyone loves it then it stops being developed and it just fades away...
It's kind of sad, but I still use a lot of these programs. Whats going to happen to
Blender/Terragen(2)/Gimp when they stop being developed?

Oshyan · August 10, 2011, 03:52:10 AM

No plans to stop TG2 dev any time soon. We're currently hard at work on a bunch of new animation functionality and have lots planned after that.

- Oshyan

Zairyn Arsyn · August 10, 2011, 09:03:51 AM

cool, someone else who knows about burning sand/falling sand games

the way i figure it if some of the planetside staff is quiet, it means their either busy working on TG2 or missing in action.

AP · August 10, 2011, 06:53:15 PM

Quote from: Oshyan on August 10, 2011, 03:52:10 AM
No plans to stop TG2 dev any time soon. We're currently hard at work on a bunch of new animation functionality and have lots planned after that.

- Oshyan

No doubt. There are so many, still untouched facets of digital terrain that you folks are going to be busy for a long time to come.

Pentagular Dark · August 11, 2011, 09:44:59 PM

What I meant was in the case of Development Stoppage. i.e. Total terrain economy meltdown Planetside shuts down terragen becomes open source somehow, and people continue to develop (while searching for another job) so dev=0. Or infinite detail comes out and takes awhile to adapt the script with the sdk. Am I overthinking this?

neon22 · August 13, 2011, 12:19:50 AM

Recently persuaded kurtz-fernhout to opensource their plant generation software. Paul and Cynthia were very gracious in opening their source up for us.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_plantstudio.html
Its on github now and I'm working on the python version in my spare time to get it making plants and then trees. (needs some UV love)
https://github.com/Neon22/PlantStudio

This s/w (was called PlantStudio) is quite good as it 'grows' the plants from initial rules. Therefore in your population you can have new and mature specimens as well as all the random goodness.
It seems to me that many renders with plants in them fail because they pull from such a small population of individuals.
So I plan on modifying the code to make a handful (technical term

) of exemplars for TG2 to use in mixed populations.
Anyone wnat to help out ?

Cheers...

Kadri · August 13, 2011, 12:55:03 AM

Neon22 , this is very good news !
I downloaded it for a month or so ago and was sad why it didn't got developed further.
It had a great potential but looked like lost in time.
I hope you will bring it back

Pentagular Dark · August 14, 2011, 02:00:10 AM

Can't code at all, but what does this have to do with my question?

neon22 · August 14, 2011, 02:43:56 AM

Quote from: CatfishEatist on August 14, 2011, 02:00:10 AM
Can't code at all, but what does this have to do with my question?

well - it seems to me - your question asks about what happens to programs like Blender/TG/Gimp when they stop being developed.

Quote from: CatfishEatist on August 10, 2011, 01:34:49 AM
This has happened to a lot of cool programs/games (i.e. Burning sand(2)/Wxsand/Creatures?).
It's this great idea everyone loves it then it stops being developed and it just fades away...
It's kind of sad, but I still use a lot of these programs. Whats going to happen to
Blender/Terragen(2)/Gimp when they stop being developed?

So my answer is that sometimes - if we're lucky - they can get OpenSourced - and if we can get a few people together - they can live on and be useful to a new generation of users.
Personally I miss Canoma and more than anything I miss Symbolics. Neither are probably coming back. Its a huge loss IMHO.

So PlantStudio is an example where after 11 years the authors have opensourced their code.
(As a flamedrawing aside - no need to worry about "Infinite detail" - not a starter for 10. Great demo though)

Pentagular Dark · August 15, 2011, 02:29:07 AM

Sorry but it just seemed to me that you could get more coders creating your own Topic, picked up by the last five or so words in your post at that time. Also saying this will probably shock you but...Canoma? (Checked it, came out a year after I was born.) Symbolics?
(The computer manufacturer right? Thanks Wikipedia.) You are talking about those right? If your talking about symolics system their operating system is still maintained. Heh, sorry for the 'scrabbled' post.