The future of new modeling tools

[boredom]

Those tools look nice, but they're hardly central to "the future of modeling." There have always been many different workflows to achieve the same result, and those videos, while cool, don't make a strong case for any specific addition to Wings3D. It's all pretty vague (e.g. Sculptris is "easy to use" and you can draw polygons in Modo. Neat! But what does it have to do with Wings3D?).

I disagree with the implications of this quote in particular: "modeling tools of today are more sophisticated and more related to the artist without much technicality." Wings3D already has a great balance of technicality and artistry. That's arguably its main selling point, and why people still use it today despite the slow development. I don't think I'd continue to use it if it lost the technical merits and became an "eyeball precision" kind of program like Sculptris. Being artist-friendly is one thing, but downplaying the technical aspect would be a huge mistake.

(02-05-2013 07:12 PM)micheus Wrote:  Differently of those softwares, Wings3d is coded in Erlang. The amount of people coding in this software language is very small compared to any C compliant language. I don't believe that would be easy to "attract new developers".

Currently, how many people are coding for Wings3d? I can think only about two people: dgud and optigon.
Oort, ggaliens and I, we are just sporadic contributors.
Each one producing at their own time; what think to be useful, interesting or was asked for someone.
I don't believe we can say that Wings3d has a developer team.

I think that is because of all these things that Wings3d is growing slowly.

That's my thinking (my words)

Indeed. I'm a programmer myself and don't know how to code in Erlang. Going into functional programming has a steep learning curve (I'm well versed in some of the theory behind it, but have yet to ever apply it). I've actually toyed with the idea of picking it up, but that has yet to materialize. I suspect this is the case for most programmers who are used to imperative programming languages.

Maybe slightly off-topic: I feel like going with Erlang is both a blessing and a curse for Wings3d. It's probably very neat and productive working with it, but the lack of manpower is seriously hurting the "open source" aspect of this program.

Hypothetically, if I had the time, I'd love to rewrite it in C# and just follow a functional paradigm (enforce referential transparency, don't maintain state unless required and multithread stateless things etc...).