by crackfox » Tue Jun 11, 2019 11:18 pm
crackfox
Tue Jun 11, 2019 11:18 pm
hi @goldorak,
i have tried to make sense of it all, but short of reading all of the forum posts its kind of impossible to make heads or tails of all of this.
fwiw i bought into the two year enterprise sub. i was kind of forced to since i had a deadline and the last version actually broke octane for me so in order to finish the project i had to upgrade.
troubleshooting was not the luxury i could afford at that moment.
i have some questions. actually alot but let me try and put some into words.
you wrote:
We did V3.08, V4 and V5 in 12 months, and V6 with RTX is halfway done and early next year. So if you want those kind of updates every year multiply 3 x 75 and you have more cost than $179 year which is what it is on the shop page today. Also, V4 was free and still is, so amortize the upgrades from that perspective.
i have literaly no idea what this is about. what v5 and 6? isn´t the nomenclature 2018, 2019 etc? even so its june and i have not seen anything of 2019.1. what are you referring to here? if v6 is indeed 2019.1 then the "early next year" has been missed by quite a margin.
you wrote:
Perpetual licenses for 2019 will have limits: they won’t extend to services or bundles like extra All Access DCC plugins, cloud, headless and slave nodes, livedb2, RNDR Network, and will not be actively updated long term after initial release to fix future breaking driver and GPU hardware changes.
but what of v4 users in that case? gpu drivers will surely break things so what would be the solution here? in a year of two, with hardware and driver changes, having "v4 perpetually" will be moot.
example: otoy posted videos showcasing 2018.1 features which nudged me towards the sub (besides the project urgency and the broken v4 version i had)
i installed it expecting to play around with vectron and spectron. vectron was and is a mess. i can load a mandelbrot fractal whopdeefriggindoo. spectron, well i can put in a spotlight with a fog cone, but cannot see any changes with volume rendering compared to earlier versions.
i have no idea what i am doing in both of these cases but the documentation is still v4 which is absolutely disgraceful.
the august 2018 video advertised:
meshes being able to be vectorised into vectron objects.
vectron procedural primitives
boolean operations
osl graphs as nodes
vectron examples
polarized lighting.
nearly a year later, i cant seem to find any of these features present (unelss its all under the hood, doubtful). could you please point me to them as, like i said, there is not documentation to actually find and use these features. if they are not present, then all of this falls simply under false advertising category and you should be providing either complementary time or refunds. i will put a more official complaint, this is basically a rant.
i need to be blunt: being your user for a few years now, it is very clear to me that otoy as a company is thoroughly unfit to have a steady flow of stable versions and features in any sort of managable timeframe. infact every company from microsoft to autodesk to adobe is struggling with this, and the results are simply buggy software. since the whole subscription system is based on time, this leaves us, the users at an incredible disadvantage. with a regular scheme the constant wait is simply annoying, with a subscription system its a whole different ball game.
i have been there, waiting for the announced features for months upon months.
SaaS is surely attractive for much of the software companies but in the hurry to rake in the money and lock in the costumers, the "service" part is paid little attention to.
i actually gave you the benefit of the doubt and got onto the wagon and now feel more and more scammed out of my money. i know you guys are working hard but like i said the track record has been and remains abysmal.
as joss wrote it few pages back, octane always felt like half alpha half beta, never a stable software i have serious doubts that anything will change.
what remains is the fact that octane provides the most gorgeous looking images out there and it saddens me that you have taken this route. i, once again, have to look into alternatives.
best render quality, best support. (beppe is the king!) horrible management apparently.
i dont mean to be vitriolic or offensive, just trying to give a user perspective. hope you take it that way. on the whole i have nothing but the greatest respect for what you are putting together, but it does not seem that you feel the same way about your users.