Howdy all!
Great to hear your opinions, ty for sharing those! A few thoughts in reply :)
- Software developers have two options really - say nothing about what they might be working on to save disappointment when things change, but it leaves all the users in the dark; or be open and share what we are / might / would like to work on, which keeps the development process open to users but then does have disappointment when things change (and it's always WHEN and not IF, things always change with software development).
We chose the second, but of course that has the catch that then people can get upset if something gets moved back. We still think that is the "lesser of two evils" and so we'll continue to share. We do our best to keep Trello updated, we'll see if we can improve how we do that.
No matter how much we improve it though, Trello or any other announcement of things we'd like to work on - or even things we are working on - should never, ever be taken as a promise, as someone called it. Even a long way into developing something, it can all be found to be unworkable and have to be abandoned. So, we will share what we are doing, but do please remember the realities of development when share. We can't stress enough that it is usually impossible to promise anything in development, and so we never do, until it's actually in a release :)
- On features and their priorities, everyone always has their own opinion. For example, there was an opinion here that the NVIDIA Denoiser was really nothing major, just something generic. Well first, it still takes a lot to implement it, just because it is NVIDIA's Denoiser doesn't mean making it work well with Corona is trivial. Next, in fact, our implementation is better than most ;) We get good denoising in reflections and refractions, that is not always achieved by others using the same NVIDIA denoiser.
And next, this "just a generic feature" to one person is a huge game changer to others, as we've heard from other users. So what is the greatest thing since sliced bread to one person, is just some generic feature to someone else. This is true for all features of course, the NVIDIA one is just an example. We could pick the material library too, also said by someone in the post to be not very important except for newbies, while we've heard from major archviz studios that it is an awesome addition.
So in that regard, the last few releases have had their features that many DO regard as game changing, and critical to their workflow (and yep, that's archviz workflows!) Everyone will always see a feature differently. You can't please all of the people all of the time, as the saying goes :)
- Don't forget that we also mentioned a lot of work went into things behind the scenes to improve stability, and clean up the code base. This becomes necessary once the software grows past a certain point (if you want to keep the code stable, easy to add new features to with a minimum of risk of breaking things, and so on). Sure, we could avoid doing such "busy work" as it isn't very visible or exciting, and pile new feature on top of new feature, but this brings a lot of pain and hardship for users down the line (I am sure everyone can think of software where this has happened, and is aware of how that plays out!)
This kind of work may not be that exciting in that release, but it sure is exciting further down the line when innovation can continue!
- We ain't done being revolutionary and groundbreaking :) Whether the last few releases have got you excited or not, there will be things coming in the future that will. That will be made possible in part because of keeping the code lean and mean. Also, some of these things take time, they involve pure research first - for example, our planned implementation of caustics (planned, not promised ;) ). Our plan is to make it easier, and faster, than what we are used to for caustics. Whether that could have been done a year ago is open to question, it took research, and testing, to see if this was even feasible. So, sometimes the overnight revolution to rendering takes a while to happen :)