Thanks again. Really sorry for bugging you guys.

matej wrote:@PolygonPusher, I completely agree on all your points. The lack of a bug tracking & feature request tracking system is the hardest thing to comprehend. Such tools are a must, if you are serious about doing a public beta testing aimed at improving your product.
A simple example of organizational mess from RS is the 'current' material competition - which was started, extended a few times and left there forgotten, without any feedback or explanations. Now, the question is; why should anyone bother to contribute, if RS is not being serious about it?
Thanks for taking your time and thinking about it. It's much appreciated! There has always been a part of the community who is disappointed or frustrated. We have to live with that and are trying to solve one problem at a time.PolygonPusher wrote:A suggestion that I think will help to minimize the negativity from community that I keep see growing.
Sorry, but we can't be more transparent, because this is not an open source project, but a commercial venture. The only thing that will keep people happy is regular updates.Refractive Software needs to be more transparent in its development and needs more customer service.
Yes, that's correct. And we probably may have to set one up. There is the problem, that a bug database has to be maintained, which can be a lot of work and takes time, which is then not available for development.A few things that bother me right now are about the development of Octane.
1: No public bug tracking system.
The whole point of a public beta is to get feed back. There is no proper way of doing so and that makes me concerned that the publics feed back is not getting accounted for and that there is no way to fined out if a bug was fixed by v1
Again, not a good idea for a commercial venture.2: No public road map.
This really goes off of issue #1. If we had a bug tracker we as a community would feel better seeing the progress and would understand if roadmap milestones were a little late. But even still we have no idea were the current progress is or how long it maybe till the next release.
For technical questions there are basically two places where you can ask them: The forum and via email. If you ask in the forum, you will usually get an answer a lot quicker than via mail. The manpower of the forum is much bigger than of Refractive Software3: No publicly defined hierarchic of management and departments of development.
If I have a question or find a specif problem who do I ask, how/where should I ask and how long will it it be before I get a response. This is big if you want to be known for good customer services.
Again, we don't want to disclose too much too early. I really hope that Octane releases will appear now more often than in the past and that this will keep you guys happy.4: Not enough public disclosure of advancements being made.
Just make a blog post and or thread post "More often" with progress reposts and ideas. This will show that this program its not just some one way track to no were and the people involved are always thinking of new things to add and do. People are investing their money before the product is ready, we need to feel that our investment will live on and this program will be all it can be. I think the bottom line is stop leaving the public in the dark. Stop making announcements of staff leaving and management step down. Continue to show accountability and advancements with the publics investments and everyone will be much happier.
We are trying our best, but it's not easy with a few people only.I really like Octane and I think the developers who are working on it are great, but I think the customer services side of thing are just about non existent with Refractive Software, and that is why we are seeing this increase of negativity in forums.
I can guarantee you, that this assumption is incorrect. There is always room to complain.If you do better to show where you are and where your going, no one would have room to complain.
Again, thanks for the input.But thats just my 2 cents.
Best.
- Josh
Indeed!abstrax wrote: I can guarantee you, that this assumption is incorrect. There is always room to complain.
just ignore them and keep up the good workabstrax wrote:There has always been a part of the community who is disappointed or frustrated. We have to live with that and are trying to solve one problem at a time.