No. At that point Andrew was ready to throw in the towel. The reception he got from Ton and guys like Koenig was too cold to take, even before the conference. He finally found a way out of such a sticky situation by mentioning his supposed consultation with this fake UI guru. To me, there is no such thing as science when it comes to UI. They’re silly to me. Regular people should be able to determine which works and which doesn’t when it comes to user interface, workflow, etc. You don’t need fake UI experts. If you followed Andrew’s three videos (forgetting the fourth), they all make sense.
You do realize that this the roadmap that was posted 3 years ago re-bottled and re-branded there is a pattern to all this.
-
Ton makes a post on the blog about things that are going to happen in Blender in a few years time.
-
This post contains a list of projects that are actively in development which are usually a few in number and most that are just speculative wishes.
-
Because naivety is never in short supply blender artist fail to recognises that most of that shit on the list ain’t gonna fly because there is actually no one to work on it so places like blenderartists explode in excitement. Champagnes bottles are popped and high fives fly.
-
But soon a dark veil falls on the forum, peace treaties are torn asunder and the great Quote fest wars breaks yet again and arguments fly over features that are not even developed and are unlikely to be developed.
-
2 to 3 years down the line nothing is really developed or in trunk so someone gets royally pissed off and in the “Blender 2.8x development thread” links to Ton’s blog post, gets ugly with the devs and says they shouldn’t post targets that they don’t intend on developing.
-
Six Months down, from that angry post in the "Blender 2.8x development thread’ line Ton makes a blog post about thing that will be in Blender 3.0 and the cycle repeats itself.
agreed lots of good intentions
but to do work you still need manpower
and as we seen in past devs were overworked
I mean someone somewhere should evaluate the work load and see how many devs are required to do it in a realist way
but it is a difficult task for any manager
base on past experiences I think this has been underestimated a lot !
anyway only time will show us what happen
and hope the bad cycle can be broken
happy bl
@tyrant monkey:
you really see little difference between 2.4 and 2.7 blender?
too much fuzz about 101 in my opinion. Seems like someone here fears that blender will be stripped down (like in Andrew Price proposal) to a toy 3d app. It will not. Com’on…
I like the workflow approach, and I think that if managed well it could be used already as a 101 version.
Here are two old mockups.
http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/8/85/Mockup02_06_nodesc.png note the tabs on top
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=61217I like this one (by me ;)) because it lets you “choose the amount of clutter” in the interface depending on the work you are actually doing.
I’m confident that devs are looking further than me and will provide us a smarter solution.
This is already possible. Create an empty to have as group parent, select all objects for your group, then the empty last, I think it’s ctrl+p in object mode to parent all to the active, keep transforms, and then you can move the empty and the rest will follow. In the outliner the parent will at the scene nodegraph level and the children leaves beneath. You can ctrl+click in the outliner on the select or the hide/show and render to make the setting (or selection) apply to children as well.
Mhm. And then try to create a bunch of instances of that “group”. Then decide to modify the group by adding a few objects. Watch how the changes aren’t propagated.
No, the closest you can get to groups is dupligroups. It is somewhat unweildy because you have to create a new scene and can’t modify the groups in context, or put modifiers on them. But it works most of the time.
This sounds like one of the best ideas to come out of the High Command for a while.
Lol… not saying you´re wrong 
However, this doesn´t seem to be the usual speech given at the beginning of the year or at Blender conference to keep donations coming. Taking a year off official releases seems like a wake-up call because things haven´t worked out as planned(not just features in limbo, failed crowdfunding for feature film, no filmgrant, no GSOC), like you said. Ton seems to understand things need to be done.
Personally, I would love for the Blender foundation to do what the Krita foundation are doing and organize a one-off crowdfunding campaign specifically for Blender development, no movies involved, with clearly stated goals (say hire 2 more fulltime developers for 6 months to work exclusively on improving physics simulation in Blender, or nodify everything, or both). That I would spend my money on, and I´m sure many others would too.
+1 and having the possibility to propose features.
Yes, it’s one of the Blender Cycles.
I wrote a proposal, and am starting to code blender,
(I was going to code the feature I proposed)
they kinda treat me like shit.
I started working on the idea, and Moguri told me to write a proposal so the feature would conform to their ideas for the feature, and was basically told to be quiet…
I have coded a game for years, and promised the proceeds to bge development,
Its almost done, and Ton wont even respond when I ask him about it.
Not everyone is a C++ coder. I have been learning to contribute, and it feels like they would rather I jump under a bus.
BPR; I saw your proposal on the mailing list and they didn’t treat you like crap at all. The only thing is that they want to have it run by the rest of the BGE team.
If you’re expecting a shower of praise and unconditional agreement then you’re still pretty naive on how development works.
I thought that you had to reach some sort of milestone before you make a proposal
in that case…
I’ll be right back, let me post a “Proposal” on adaptive sampling in cycles 
But on a serious note
What was the proposal?
I was going to add a color border to logic bricks, to break up the clutter on the eye, that the user can choose the color for visual grouping,
made another proposal for coloring logic noodles, and for leaving the last highlighted noodle on top.
Ton wrote me and said he would take me off the list If I write on the list, (I was actually trying to help) I dont understand how I hurt anything by proposing something I am offering to code.
@BPR
…That really doesn’t seem so significant to be honest with you
(Your proposal not the fact that ton threatened to write you off)
It’s just a color border
Maybe he mistook you as a troll
(I don’t really blame him, if anyone can make a proposal, I imagine that he’s getting a lot of troll proposals)
My opinion exactly! I supported the last movie projects, but only because I wanted to support Blender. I would love for a develoment campain with total focus on development with clear targets and not on a movie. Offcourse they can talk to movie/games making studios for feedback and ideas. But they don’t need to make the movies themself.
Agree here too, stop with the movies and let artists do it, you can continue the tool development. Aren’t you coders, programers? Relation is supposed to be symbiotic.
To me everything is pretty sane… also kids need such tools, if you give something clean to a 4 year old… you’ll be surprised. Not a striped version but clean GUI. And please make an option to use only icons! We get kids starting to learn code at 7!
I don’t agree with fdfxd about that being un-significant. If you can make it go for it, getting more developers interested in the process and helping them to become more active has to start somewhere, but it seems like more often than not they do more to push people away and thats not good for Blender.
On the colored stuff, dont feel too bad though, for some reason Ton hates anything that involved colored wireframes or now in this case borders. At least thats the impression I am getting.
Anyways, they really need to worry and focus on how they are being perceived. Doing things that generate contribution and community, from what you wrote it seems like the opposite is continuing to happen.
That’s not helpful. A person wants to improve the software’s usability, and that’s the welcome he gets from blender’s veteran users.
Meaning no disrespect to you, personally, but I feel this is the attitude which led to today’s blender: powerful, undocumented software tools, hidden in a mashup of grey-on-grey interface widgets, whose unspoken message to new users is “f— you if you’re not cool enough to know how this works already, cuz I’m busy making more of the same.”
Here’s another example of that F- the user mentality: layers
You start blender for the first time, you add a cube, you touch a number key and all your stuff disappears.
It’s a great interface for the cool kids who are in on the joke, but it’s a big F- You to everyone else.
Here’s another: a recent announcement that the manual is now some kinda source-code management project instead of a web page. Message to anyone who wants to help with the manual: we made this to be convenient for us not you, we don’t care what you think about the manual, and we don’t need your help.
You want more people to support blender? Maybe you don’t, I dunno, but if you do, show them some courtesy instead of baffling them with a stinking grey button that says “F” on it. Respect the new user and his problems.
I believe the reason for Ton’s response is because the bf-committers mailing list is not intended to be a place where all of the volunteers announce their proposals and discuss them (that type of things belongs on developer.blender.org once you have done an initial patch for others to look at).
I don’t think it’s healthy to have an assumption of malice on Ton’s part as a kneejerk reaction and it comes close to basically using him as a scapegoat.
That’s not helpful. A person wants to improve the software’s usability, and that’s the welcome he gets from blender’s veteran users.
Please read the actual discussion on the mailing list (it’s not a simple dismissal like everyone claims), also please note BPR’s past history of posting things in places where they shouldn’t be (like using the developer site to make a feature request).