Some thoughts on the future

Started by Matt, May 07, 2014, 08:27:55 PM

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Matt

I'm sure that some of you who read Jo's announcement from yesterday will have questions about how this affects the future of Terragen. This is the post I'm talking about:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18276.msg177276.html#msg177276

We are a very small team to begin with, so this is a big event for us. But there are many things I'm excited about, some that are currently in development and others that I'm eager to get started on as soon as possible. I'm grateful that Jo will be able to stay involved with Planetside and the Terragen community, but this certainly affects our programming bandwidth. Recognising this, we want to get more programmers involved directly with Terragen soon. One of the ways we're going to do this is by releasing an SDK this year, to allow independent programmers and third party software companies to make plugins to extend Terragen's capabilities and tools to enable better ways to work with Terragen. We'll share more information about this in the coming months. This is going to be very good for Terragen. There are some other ideas we're considering, but the SDK work is already in progress and is definitely something you'll see come to fruition this year.

Having an SDK will be great for Terragen in the long run, but that doesn't mean we're going to sit back and leave it to other people to keep Terragen moving forward. I have a vision for Terragen that extends through Terragen 4, Terragen 5 and even beyond, and I'm determined to make it happen. With Jo stepping back to a more limited involvement, it's the end of an era at Planetside, but it's also the beginning of a new one and I'm excited about many things. Some that are in development already (like the SDK), some that are still on the drawing board or just in the ideas phase. We've always been an international team, but as part of the next chapter I'll be looking to build a team here in Los Angeles, a place I have come to call home (for all there is to love and hate about the place!). I think this next challenge will be extremely rewarding for me, and I hope the energy I derive from that will show through in the products we develop and the support we can give to the people who use them.

Cheers,

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

TheBadger

Too many interesting things to comment on in the OP post! Sounds like big big stuff! Sounds great!

But the obvious thing to ask for clarity on is, so Planetside is now an American company?! Well that just makes me happy!
It has been eaten.

Hubert_Holin

The SDK will more than welcome. One thing I definitely look forward to is adding Python support to Terragen (I do hope I will have time to do so, and that the SDK will have enough in it for this to be technically feasible). Of course, this still is no replacement for having a talented developer in house, especially one such as Jo!

Bonne chance

Hubert Holin

AP

#3
I would love to join the team but I am no programmer, that is for certain.  :)

yossam

Sounds very promising............best of luck.  :)

Dune

Thanks for unfolding your plans, Matt. And I am sorry too that I'm not a programmer. I hope you'll get together a good team and further development will result in an even more staggering software!

Good luck!

Kadri


I am no expert on those things but i wish the SDK was finished already since now.

Matt i know you won't-can't share it but i wish i could see
what you meant here  "I have a vision for Terragen that extends through Terragen 4,
Terragen 5 and even beyond, and I'm determined to make it happen."
This makes me feel good and i hope the new team will be bigger and we see faster what your ideas are :)

zaxxon

Intriguing news indeed. Most of us here are pretty well invested in the continued development of Terragen and I wish the greatest success for you and Planetside going forward.

jaf

Will it be possible to have a SDK public alpha/beta phase?  It may interest casual users that have programming interests and be a good way to "mold" the product.
(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

Oshyan

We will be starting with a private alpha phase for the SDK, but a public beta may be possible in the future. The eventual goal of course is to make the SDK widely available.

- Oshyan

kalwalt

This is great! I think the SDk will open new frontier for the software itself and help in the usage of it, One of the big achievement will be to develop .tgo exporters for the most popular 3d modeling softwares. It depend on what kind of SDK and which degree of access that will be permitted to a developer. I can't say that I'm a developer, but  i have an experience in programming ( C++,C#, and javascript) i like to develop little applications with OpenFrameworks openframeworks.cc , if it will be available an SDK i'd like to contribute in such a way, into my limits of my knowledge. Please, keep informed us on it! :)
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PabloMack

Quote from: Matt on May 07, 2014, 08:27:55 PMWe've always been an international team, but as part of the next chapter I'll be looking to build a team here in Los Angeles, a place I have come to call home (for all there is to love and hate about the place!).

I think it makes sense to be located close to "Hollywood", the epicenter for the filmmaking world. I recently got a quote for an SMD pick-N-place machine from a manufacturer located in the Los Angeles area. Too bad we were just there last year. We might have had a couple more places we could have visited while there to attend the SVP meetings.

http://www.smtmax.com/
http://www.vertpaleo.org/

KlausK

#12
Two and a half years have almost gone by since the last post in this thread
and I was wondering if there is any news regarding the SDK?
Now that I`m a proud owner of TG4 I WANT IT ALL!  :o hahahaha...
cheers, Klaus
/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)

Oshyan

The SDK is still available privately, upon-request. So far only Daniil/Blinkfrog has created something public, but others have access, whether for their own internal projects, or other things they're experimenting with. We are working on updating the SDK for Terragen 4 as well.

- Oshyan

KlausK

#14
Oshyan, thanks for answering and sorry for the late reply.

I am by no means a programmer so surely no help to bringing the SDK forward in any way.

A little bit of C++ and Python programming here and there in 3dsmax (way back) and Softimage
but, mostly scripts and little extensions to help my workflow in the scripting language available
in the application. More of a on and off thingie...
I`ll leave it up to planetside to decide wether it makes sense to make the SDK available
to me at this time or not. I`m not in desperate "need" of it - simply curious.

cheers, Klaus
/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)