Hi Michael,
sorry for my goofy language,
I'm 3D artist, web developer and programmer (or simply computer-savvy) for 16 years and I'm big fan of open-source applications, for now I'm working on many projects include Chromium, Firefox, Luxrender, Notepad++, Wordpress and Blender.

I believe MoI need to be open-source to grow faster and expanded by third-party tools, don't get me wrong, I appreciate your work and you did a great job on both Rhino and MoI (you are genius for sure), but I believe MoI cannot compete with similar packages like Rhino and you can't push the price that much, I'm sure people will Donate more than that if you release MoI under GPL license and let us expanding/customizing MoI with nice public SDK.

Honestly I believe MoI have good potential as a "Concept tool" along with precise CAD modeling for 3D Artists, so I like to push it forward and make it more powerful than ever by help of you, other users and MoI community, because we all love MoI and you know that, Modeling is essential part of 3D visualization and we love fast/friendly/lightweight (and maybe non-autodesk? ;/) modeling tools like Modo, Zbrush and MoI !!

I'm sure you already know benefit of open-source development, so this my suggestion and nothing more, please don't get me wrong.
Best regards
Nima

Hi Nima, it's not possible for MoI to be open source - the geometry library that MoI licenses is called Solids++ (http://www.integrityware.com/solids.html), and it's not open source so it's not possible for me to release that code.

Even aside from that, I don't like the kind of uncertain and complex business model that you are describing (which seems to be just hope that people donate??). I prefer to have a simple low priced product that is just purchased normally - that's a nice simple system to be based off of.

re: growing fast - there are actually a lot of negative side effects from growing too fast, things like program bloat and inconsistent UI design come along with that so a lot of the nicest features of MoI (its fast, fluid, and easy to use UI) could easily be damaged by the kind of system that you're describing, so that's also another reason why I would not set things up like that.

A more kind of slow and incremental carefully designed program growth delivers a much better and coherent end result.


> but I believe MoI cannot compete with similar packages like Rhino

Well, of course it depends on exactly what you're trying to do. But quite a lot of the tools in Rhino are for pretty specialized uses, the vast majority of people don't use every single tool in it.

So I don't really agree... But also one of the main ideas for MoI is to make it possible for people to benefit from CAD who were completely unable to use it before because other tools like Rhino, etc... are just so complex and difficult to use. So in a certain sense MoI is not exactly trying to complete with these other packages, it's got a somewhat different focus. Over time the functionality of MoI increases of course and has more overlap, there was a big jump in functionality between MoI v1 and MoI v2, and there will be a similar jump from MoI v2 to MoI v3, it's kind of odd that you don't think that will happen?

Things have been quiet for the past 10 months or so as I've been doing some major internal architectural changes, that is nearly done and it won't be too much longer before I'm more on a track for new features again.

- Michael

Thank you Micheal for your feedback, you are very nice and thoughtful, I will appreciate your decision and I hope you don't upset with my post.
I understand what you mean and definitely agree with you in many parts, 3dsmax/Maya is a good example of negative side effects from growing too fast and releasing immature beta(pig) releases every year (+ few servicepacks only a week after ;/), honestly Autodesk messed up both Max and Maya.

It's good to see you working on more advanced features and never trying to compete with similar packages, that's a big point to me.
Sadly I find MoI about 2 weeks ago and I'm using Alternate trial version for now, so I don't have much information about MoI's development in the past, I'm so sorry if I judge quickly without much information. (PS I didn't know MoI is your serious business)

Now MoI's dev-cycle and roadmap is more vivid to me.
I'm looking forward to v3 and I'm sure you rock it like always!
Sorry for language again,
Best regards
Nima

Hi Nima,

> so I don't have much information about MoI development in
> the past, I'm so sorry if I judge quickly without much
> information.

No problem! For a good overview, check out here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html

That's a collection of all the release notes for every v2 beta release, by looking over that you can see exactly what happened from version 1 to version 2 - there was quite a lot of stuff added for v2, but with very minimal UI bloat! :)

It won't be too much longer before v3 gets started in a similar way.

There is a discussion thread here about people's top requests for v3:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3628.1

If you have some particular features that you'd like to see in v3, you could make a top 5 list and post it to that thread - that discussion thread is definitely going to be a major influence for v3 features.


Just jamming lots of features in too rapidly is a pretty surefire way to turn a nice and streamlined UI into a very messy and chaotic one, which is kind of the regular way that programs change. But it's a big focus for MoI to retain it's nice streamlined UI so that's why just plain speed of changes is not particularly a big focus for me...

Thanks,
- Michael

> (PS I didn't know MoI is your serious business)

Yup, I've been working on it full time for the past 7 years.

Some people assume that since it is easy to use that it must have been easy to create as well, but the funny thing is that it's exactly the opposite - it takes a lot lot more design effort to make something easy to use than just piling features together.

- Michael

Completely understand and Agree with everything you said above, good to know I have this chance to make 5 wishes for MoI 3!
I love Genius minds with high self-esteem, lots of respect to you!
Cheers
Nima