Michael,

As an experienced developer you must have had an idea of how relentless users would be with their requests for new functionality. so...

how do you determine which requests are actually useful advancements vs cool wiz bang stuff?

When you had the idea for MOI3d did you have an "endpoint" in mind or were you prepared to just keep writing and rewriting until the zombie apocalypse?

How do you prevent "mission creep"?

Do you have a desire to expand beyond a one man operation?

Do you plan on developing any companion products i.e. renderer, analysis tools (FEA, flow dynamics, etc)?

Every developer I know has one or more significant personality maladjustments. Whats yours?

Thank you for all your hard work. It must feel pretty good to contribute as much as you have to design software.

Hi beanworks,

> how do you determine which requests are actually useful advancements
> vs cool wiz bang stuff?

This is where doing support work comes into play - it's by doing support work that I get a feel for which areas people are having difficulty with, and the easiest gauge of usefulness is will it help solve problems that people are running into currently.


> When you had the idea for MOI3d did you have an "endpoint" in mind or were you prepared
> to just keep writing and rewriting until the zombie apocalypse?

I didn't have a really super specific endpoint in mind, but I did have a general idea of what I'd like to have at a sort of "mature" product level, there is still a ways to go yet before getting there...


> How do you prevent "mission creep"?

Well, one easy way is that being only one person developing it, it just physically limits the amount of wild goose chasing that is even possible. Also there are a lot fewer arguments with only one person making decisions! ;) I've also tried to make ease of use and a lightweight feel to be core primary values for this product, and just having that as a major continuing focus helps to keep up an active battle against bloat.


> Do you have a desire to expand beyond a one man operation?

Not particularly. I can't rule out that would happen at some point but I actually enjoy working at a generally smaller scale.


> Do you plan on developing any companion products i.e. renderer,
> analysis tools (FEA, flow dynamics, etc)?

I would like to develop a set of what I call "communication" features which would include some basic rendering stuff, that would be for helping with communicating your design to other people after you've modeled it. But probably those things will be built in and not separate companion products, I'm pretty focused on just working on one core product. If anything instead of trying to work on analysis tools myself I'd be more likely to instead focus on making tools for other developers to make companion products and let others create those kind of add-ons. But I want to get the core modeling tools to be more mature first before trying to do stuff like that.


> Every developer I know has one or more significant personality
> maladjustments. Whats yours?

I guess workaholic / too much over focusing, ... I think it's somewhat less of a problem than when I was younger though.


> Thank you for all your hard work. It must feel pretty good to
> contribute as much as you have to design software.

Thanks very much! :)

- Michael

Good questions beanworks, turned out to be an enjoyable interview.
Thanks to both you and Michael.

-

FEA and rendering with MoI,

I like it !

Thank you for the questions


Kaël

Would a simple image capture be a wild goose chase? I like to model, then print out a screenshot and sketch over the top. But a screenshots resolution is not enough sometimes?

Hi yakas, it is possible to set up a script on a shortcut key that will generate a viewport image but at a higher resolution than the actual current screen. It places the image into the clipboard so you can then paste it into an image processing program.

See here for the script:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1049.5

That should do what you are looking for.

- Michael

great, thanks

Hi set up the script but when i paste the capture into photoshop the image is black?
Any Ideas

Hi yakas which MoI version and which operating system are you using?

- Michael

Hi yakas, also have you modified the script to make a particularly large resolution image? If so it may be larger than what the video card supports, try lowering it somewhat.

- Michael

Works now, I updated my driver. thanks