Hi Kevin,
Quote from: Kevin F on June 24, 2008, 03:26:38 AM
Don't make matters worse Jo by replying to a very reasonable question in such a manner. i.e. "That's not what I said." ?? what's not what you said?
I didn't mean to cause offense, I apologise if any was taken. Just to straighten it out, "That's not what I said." was referring to sentence preceding i.e. I did not say that a problem had been found/identified. It doesn't help to take it out of context.
Quote"I think if you actually read what I wrote......." The Guy did and just asked a simple question, since what you said was not "pretty clear" i.e. what the issue was.
I felt that I had already described and exactly the situation regards the TP4 release, and I didn't feel it was necessary to go into detail about what the issue was. That doesn't necessarily give anyone useful further information, interesting perhaps but not useful :-). The poster was bringing up the issue of postponements, when I had already said what the situation was. I thought it was important to clarify that I
did actually mean what I said originally, as there seemed to be some question about it despite it being clearly stated.
If it was confusing in my initial post, a "release candidate" is a version which is deemed ready for release, but we still put it through a testing phase in case something unanticipated springs up. It can happen, and experience has shown that even small changes can cause unforeseen problems if they are not tested before releasing to the public. With TP3 that process was rushed when it should been given a bit longer, especially given the magnitude of recent changes and so the memory leak problem got through. We can't just release a version with that fix because we need it to go through a testing process, and there were other important bugs we felt also needed to be fixed before a public release was made.
With normal alpha releases we can carry on going as usual, but release candidates slow us down because we need to be much more careful about what changes. That's one of the reasons we try and get together a decent number of fixes and changes before we start with release candidates. The testing process for release candidates does take some time, alpha testers need to get to grips with something over a reasonable period, and not everyone can drop what they're doing and get testing straight away. The alpha testers are very helpful to us for making sure silly problems don't get through to the public where they cause more hassle to more people, and it's best not to circumvent that process. It usually works out badly.
We did warn that TP3 was likely to be an unstable release and recommended that people stick with TP2 if that was likely to be a problem.
QuoteI still can't believe that a product promised in Dec for release in Jan STILL is not ready 6 months later.
We've already explained why that was - multithreading. We made the decision that it was too important to not be in the final release, and it was a hard decision to make. It took longer than expected to implement, and it also threw into relief some serious problems with other parts of the renderer which needed to be addressed at the same time. We could have made the decision to go with what we had at the time, and it would have been slower and unstable.
To be straight up and unambiguous about it, with the exception of the memory leak which will be addressed in the TP4 release, the TP3 release is a considerably more advanced application than the application which would have been released in January. Everyone using TP3 is not
behind where they would be if TG2 had been made final and released in January. Realistically if TG2 had been tidied up and a final release made then, we would still be where we are today ( probably behind because multithreading would have been put back a month or two ), except the price would have increased already.
Regards,
Jo