Maya users plead for some sort of progress update on Plugin Tweet

[Sugarninja]

I wish I found this thread a long time ago...
Let's pick up the ball on this, Otoy! It's time to let maya users in from the cold.
Tutorials for the more complex functions (once they work) would be huge.
We miss you.

[Goldorak]

We've added new devs to Maya team to significantly speed development up and increase support capacity (check other threads). We've also pushed Kai's UX work (i.e. the deep refactoring) to after 3.0 so we can get a production ready build of 3.0 out to you ASAP without any further delays. In all honesty, I am deeply sorry this wasn't done a few months back. It was my call to wait on the refactoring before releasing 3.0 and that was a mistake on my part. please blame me (as PM of our internal plug-ins), not the devs.

[calus]

We've added new devs to Maya team to significantly speed development up and increase support capacity (check other threads). We've also pushed Kai's UX work (i.e. the deep refactoring) to after 3.0 so we can get a production ready build of 3.0 out to you ASAP without any further delays. In all honesty, I am deeply sorry this wasn't done a few months back. It was my call to wait on the refactoring before releasing 3.0 and that was a mistake on my part. please blame me (as PM of our internal plug-ins), not the devs.

Hi Jules,

The recent V3 Maya plugin is already stable, and nice to have,
JimStar is doing a great job with that,
but as it is based on its V2 implementation, obviously it comes with the same structural limitations.

And the situation is still kind of confusing:

How can the situation be better compared to the V2's situation,
if JimStar is the only developer working on the Maya plugin and on the Blender plugin at the same time?
isn't it exactly the same situation ?
Where is the experienced Maya developer supposedly hired by Otoy ?

What happen to the Kai's V3 "deep refactoring" development branch ? did everyone give up on this ?
Is there a different UX development project to secretly redesign and refactor the Maya plugin ?

[calus]

If it was not clear, my questions in the previous post are not retorical
I would love to get some answers, please.

[Goldorak]

I got your PM about this and will reply. Sorry, been backlogged in PM replies.

[Sugarninja]

Updates?
What have the devs done for two weeks?
Stable v3 plugin for maya?
Bueller?

[haze]

Updates?
What have the devs done for two weeks?
Stable v3 plugin for maya?
Bueller? :geek:

Please read the weekly dev updates for the last two weeks:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=58012
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=57855

[calus]

Here we go again ...

It's been one month since JimStar's (failed) attempt to fix Motion-blur in the Maya plugin,
since then nothing has been done at all in the plugin except updating the Octane SDK.

On top of that we don't get any answer from Otoy about this,
and usually when we receive zero information this is because a true answer might be embarrassing.

That's ridiculous, we Maya users are not children, we can handle true explanations.
Let's have an adult talk about what's going on with Maya plugin development and how the plans and communication can be improved:

The situation for the Maya plugin has been improved a lot since this Topic started,
but it's still very far from perfect.
Development had so much delay and was starting from so far that what have been done is mostly fixing the V2 code and make it as stable as possible.
JimStar has done a very good job so far, patching up his old code, fixing the bugs and adding carefully V3 features.
But we are now at a stage where tackling the bigger flaws of the plugin or adding bigger features, can't be done by patching the old code.
And indeed lastly some new features have been implemented the old way (quick non future-proof hack) creating new absurd issues in the plugin.

The plugin structure limits have been reached, now some parts of the plugin have to be refactored to go on.
The old hacks in the plugin need to be marked as deprecated and progressively replaced by proper future-proof implementation.

Maybe JimStar vanishing have something to do with that, but how can we know ? we still have zero useful information from Otoy...
And anyway developer isolation can't be efficient even if it helps to concentrate,
before to do that, user feedback must be considered first...
else this is just loosing time again to implement things the wrong way and try to fix them years later...


@Goldorak, I hope you now realize that JimStar alone and part-time for the Maya plugin development is not enough,
next developments need even more resource.
Please consider again the promised additional Maya developer that never arrived,
the situation is not going to solve magically itself,
Blender plugin fate is even more a disaster, this was really predictable as JimStar is also needed for blender plugin development and he is already not enough for the Maya plugin...
as expected Blender users are just totally ignored since months...

[FrankPooleFloating]

Maybe you guys should petition to try and get Juanjo, the dev of Octane LightWave and Octane Houdini. He is freakin' Johnny-on-the-spot and bangs out the LightWave plug updates with great aplomb (presumably Houdini too), plus adds all kinds of kickass features above and beyond his call of duty -- in LightWave's SDK, which is prolly a joke compared to Maya's. It's a hell of a nice feeling to have such a pro as your plug dev... But at the same time, I would hate to see him spread too thin, because he is only one man... On second thought, I take it back. Don't petition!

[calus]

Maybe you guys should petition to try and get Juanjo, the dev of Octane LightWave and Octane Houdini. He is freakin' Johnny-on-the-spot and bangs out the LightWave plug updates with great aplomb (presumably Houdini too), plus adds all kinds of kickass features above and beyond his call of duty -- in LightWave's SDK, which is prolly a joke compared to Maya's. It's a hell of a nice feeling to have such a pro as your plug dev... But at the same time, I would hate to see him spread too thin, because he is only one man... On second thought, I take it back. Don't petition!

Indeed, I'm jealous, this would be my dream to have Juanjgon as the Maya plugin developer,
But don't be afraid I think we are stuck with official Otoy plugin development and the problems that comes with it,
I can't understand why basically all external plugin developers are doing so great while when a plugin is handled directly by Otoy, things go wrong.
To be honest things have improved for Otoy plugins, but quality of development, support and communication, is still ridiculous compared to what is provided by Juanjgon, Aoktar or Paul.