An angry c4d user

[TomG]

Hi!

1) It IS hard to find time to report problems, that is true - but also, without people giving us information on the problem (what it is, when it happens, crash logs, etc.) we may be unaware that you are experiencing the problem, and without the extra info, we may be unable to replicate it and so we would be unable to fix it. There's no easy solution to that - if we don't know you have a problem and what that problem is, we just won't know to work on it.

2) The forum is the place to report it, or by ticket, because we need some way of tracking everything. We want to be able to reply to you on a particular problem and say "We think it's fixed, can you check the latest daily build to find out?". It would be impossible to find one reply on one thread on Facebook, so we have to have some organized, standardized method to have bugs reported to us. This is also one of the main ways you might hear about a daily build, because when we have done something that we think is a fix, we can go to the ticket or forum post and reply to you and tell you to test the daily to see, and you'll get notified.

3) The other way to hear about daily builds is to check their release announcements here on the forum. https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?board=40.0. The changelog there will show if something that sounds like it would be relevant to your problem has been included. Info on the daily builds (and link to the forum section) is on our help pages at https://help.c4d.corona-renderer.com/support/solutions/articles/12000033462-corona-renderer-for-c4d-daily-builds. Daily builds are in-progress, and can be quite frequent, so we do not announce those on Facebook - we do announce major Release Candidate releases (when Corona becomes feature-locked and just bugs are being fixed prior to release).

We are sorry you are having so many problems, and we do want to help and get Corona working the way you believe it should be working - but we can only help if we hear about them through the official channels for such things. We do appreciate that it takes time to report a problem, but there isn't any other method to handle this - it might be the problem is only happening on 1 machine out of 5,000, and unless we hear from that 1 in 5,000 person (or we happen to have one of those machines), we won't even know the problem is there. It may be it only happens when a certain workflow is followed, and as extensively as we test in house, we sure can't test every possible workflow that our users may use. This is true of all software of course, it does take someone a bit of their time to report it - the difference with Corona is that we always listen to every report and do our best to fix it, within the long and complicated list of priorities that developers have to deal with in software development.

[TomG]

As to when a bug gets fixed, that is very complex. Developers have a lot of things to balance and prioritize between, and we do our best. There will be no perfect list of priorities, because every user will see the importance of a bug differently, but we do what we can. The kinds of things that have to be factored in are

- Bugs that we found ourselves, even ones that users have never experienced
- Bugs that users report to us, which may be ones we have never experienced despite our best efforts to test as many possible cases as we can
- New features that we think users will find useful, whether or not they requested them
- New features that users have requested, whether or not we thought of them too

- How many people does the bug effect? Just 1, a small subset that use a particular version of the host software, or a subset of a particular hardware configuration? Or only within a particular unique set of steps? Or lots of people?
- How often will people run into the bug? Is it a workflow that they might use once every 6 months, or 10 times a day? Is it only a small group of people who would use it 10 times a day, and other users will never need it?
- How critical is the bug? Is there a workaround which, while inconvenient, gets most or some of that functionality up and running? Does it make certain things impossible, but they'd only be needed rarely, or would they be needed 10 times a day? Is it a crash, or loss of scene?

- Is the bug in our code, or in the host software?
- Is the bug easy to fix, or complicated?
- Does the required fix stand in isolation in the code so won't interact/interfere with other parts of the code, or does it have the potential to break other things?
- If the bug is in the host software, is it even possible to fix it? Maybe the host software doesn't expose the data we need for the fix, maybe it doesn't offer the required functionality. If we can fix it, is the fix such a complex and risky solution to get around the host software limitation that it might break other things, so we simply can't take that chance?

- Be bug reporters too: our developers have to report bugs to the host software developers, as we are users too in that regard :)

And then bear in mind that this list changes every single day, as new bugs are uncovered by us or users.

(sheesh, I am glad I am not a developer! ;) )

So, we do try hard and do our best at what is an enormously complex task. If a bug remains for a long time (and some do), it's not because we don't care, or didn't listen, it's because of the ever-shifting balances of priorities that we have to manage.

Thanks!
   Tom

[TomG]

And just to note, the list of things developers have to balance is not to say "Boohoo poor us" - we all knew what we were getting into when we chose to be developers, etc. It's just to try to explain why it is that some bugs take longer than others, and say that the reason is NEVER that we don't care, or didn't listen.

[Designerman77]

Hi Merlin,

here you find every update about the daily builds.

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=23346.msg148426#new


Greetings

Ah, Tom already posted it.

[Merlin]

Thanks, Designerman77