What's important here is that we need to finish the foundation first.
You can't expect us to write a feature that will have to be rewritten when we change the fileformat next to support instances.
We need to build houses from the ground up, no point in asking for a particular roof if we are still cementing walls.
If people want to create straw improvised roofs to put ontop of the house, great. If it's usefull, no problem.
But you can't expect us to accept that solution. We need to build a propper tiled roof once the walls are finished.
If a small company releases a car-kit for a BMW 3 series, for iphones,
don't be angy at BMW for not integrating that particular car kit in cars.
They will wait till the next revision of the car and work a high quality iphone dock into the dashboard instead.
The downside is that you have to wait for the new car revision, the upside is a high quality, discreet iphone dock, which many people will prefer.
We hear all of you, and we have been actively planning most of the features that get asked for again and again on the forums,
you just need a bit of patience until they are made available.
You can't expect us to 'integrate' this solution, it won't work.
Adding a timeline to octane is a LOT of work. And if we do it I want to do it propperly, no point having a timeline and no curve editor (which is quite a large development task) in the UI to edit the data.
An API is currently in the works, btw, more on that in time.
Next up, when the 2.48x versions are debugged, we will start work on the new scene file format, with support for instances and moving things around. (eg editing transforms)
This will then be a foundation for a timeline, which has to be done after it, we cannot do the timeline propperly before.
The issue here is not that we don't understand the priorities of features requested, but the difficulty in scheduling them due to dependencies on others, and the fact that we can't just keep adding features at a fast tempo with no planning, otherwise things will get unstable and very confusing very soon.
Take the livedb previews in 2.48, I know there are other features people want to see much more, but it was the right feature to have roeland spend time on as he had to wait for the other devs to finish structural work, so it's the best option at that time.
BTW, We're hiring 2 more developers during the next months, one is starting in 2 weeks.
Radiance