[Polyxo]

That's so brilliant!

[AndreD]

Just a small comparision with octane:
(test from http://forums.luxology.com/discussio...d=48218&page=0 )

IBL




Sunlight/Sky

[Michael Betke]

The Octane guys are getting crazy. They blame their decrese of sales to piracy and implement a World of Warcraft style copy protection. Seems like everyone only has some kind of a client at home and a internet connection is required all the time for rendering.

I really call it good-bye to them if I will get "real-time" preview or rendering in Maxwell soon. It's absolute crap to be in need of a 24/7 internet connection while rendering and such stuff.

I wonder why maxwell is still on the market with it's amount of copies floating around in torrents and file hosters. Hell, Maxwell 2.1 was faster on rapidshare as on my computer! And I licensed it! lol

[m-Que]

Well, if it's true, it's bad.
First of all, not everyone has a possibility to have their computer online 24/7.
And there is another major reason - security.
For example, we don't have our main working station connected to the internet for safety reasons (and I know some guys out there who do the same). There's another machine for surfing etc.
And btw, not so long time ago, Ubisoft decided to do the same thing with their games.
It cased massive rage of gamers and critics. In the end, their protection was hacked, letting you play without internet connection. And the ones who suffered where their clients who bought the game since Ubisoft servers used to be unstable and crashed.

Conclusion: bad idea

[Michael Betke]

Well the thread over at octane forums ended up in a 14 pages discussion about exactly your two points until it got closed by the devs. They state you could buy a hardware router for 20 bucks and open only one port so its equally to non-connected to the internet....
For the devs its simple as this: No measures agains piracy = end of octane in 6 months.

I'll wait and decide then what to do.

[Half Life]

That's just stupid business -- do a search on my name and you'll see my videos are pirated to the Nth degree... do I care? NO!

That is just more name recognition for me and future projects -- users who would never pay for them will try my videos because they have nothing to loose -- If they like them who knows where that goes long-term.

I just think of it as loss-leader and extended free trial... Maybe one day they become paying clients... if not, I never would have had their money anyway.

Building a brand is a hard thing these days -- and like it or not pirating is a big part of establishing a brand... The way I see it, you WILL be pirated if you have a product that is even remotely interesting. You might as well have a healthy attitude about instead of making life for your paying customers harder.

It's the same reasons I don't get uptight about copyrights of my artwork -- I'm the creator, I can always make more... if I can't then I'm not much of a creator.

Best,
Jason.

[bjorn.syse]

Well spoken,.

[Stinkie7000]

(...) You might as well have a healthy attitude about instead of making life for your paying customers harder.

Couldn't agree more. While I'm sure it's seriously annoying seeing your work being stolen, "punishing" the honest folks who don't mind paying seems counterproductive, to say the least. After all, in these days of torrents, cracks and what not, what are you actually paying for? Customer care!

[Tea_Bag]

(...) You might as well have a healthy attitude about instead of making life for your paying customers harder.

what are you actually paying for? Customer care!

Having software that works properly! Mainly we pay for products or software to keep that particular company innovating and producing new products - without us paying customers you have nothing! IMHO

[Half Life]

kinda makes you wonder if any software company would embrace the model of giving the software away for free but charging a monthly maintenance fee for patches, plugins, customer service and the like... might be a profitable business model, sure to capture a big market share right out of the gate.

Best,
Jason.

[Stinkie7000]

Mainly we pay for products or software to keep that particular company innovating and producing new products

That too, yes.

[max3d]

Well the thread over at octane forums ended up in a 14 pages discussion about exactly your two points until it got closed by the devs. They state you could buy a hardware router for 20 bucks and open only one port so its equally to non-connected to the internet....
For the devs its simple as this: No measures agains piracy = end of octane in 6 months.

I'll wait and decide then what to do.

Thanks for this warning. I was on the brink of ordering the Octaner beta for the fun of participating but I don´t even have a reliable enough 24 hour connection to the internet and besides I´m still of the opinion that although you only license software you should still be allowed to use it as you seem fit. So I detest software which is locked to specific systems etc f.i. as I want to test on whatever machine I have access to.

Thanks to the new GPU renderers I decided to build a test system just for playing around with it. As I didn´t want to exclude hybrid solutions it has a fast i7, 12 gb memory and only a low mem 460. Enough to see how this things work and the 460 with 2 mb is announced but not yet ready yet.

I have read though the comments and I´m a bit surprised about the negative approach of some people. Did you all forget how Maxwell looked like in the beginning, what a huge limitations there were, incomplete feature set and extremely noisy results. It was completely normal for the early adopters to at least use de-noising solutions for demo images and now it´s suddenly just a good laugh when new renderers have to use this.

I have seen 3d studio in his pre-release, 3ds max, final renderer, mental ray, indigo, maxwell and at least twenty other renderers and they all had major limitations or flaws in their alpha and beta stages. Most of the ones I mentioned turned out to be quite succesful and are now capable of vey impressive results.

So why dismiss GPU renderers at this stage? Nvidia bought Mental Images for a reason. I personally have never seen why a GPU couldn´t achieve the highest quality imaginable. You have fast 64 bits if needed processing, memory is a manageable subject if you throw some resources at it and if you achieve that you go from 8 or 16 cores to a 1000 dedicated cores. That is the largest jump in speed we have ever encountered in the history of 3D and thanks to the piggy backing on the huge games market its fully viable to throw resources at further development (as opposed to some dedicated ray trace cards in the past).

[Hybaj]

I have read though the comments and I´m a bit surprised about the negative approach of some people. Did you all forget how Maxwell looked like in the beginning, what a huge limitations there were, incomplete feature set and extremely noisy results. It was completely normal for the early adopters to at least use de-noising solutions for demo images and now it´s suddenly just a good laugh when new renderers have to use this..

Why be surprised? People on average are rather very inconsistent and have a very selective memory. Even devs have a hard time understanding some things about the factors of rendering and see stuff in things that are not really there or vice versa.

It's like arguing with an average climatologist-alarmist about the whole CO2 nonsense. They just don't get it because if there are more factors involved their brains just stick to what they feel and say stupid things like "we know much more about CO2's role in the atmosphere than we know about lung cancer."

I laugh in the face of bad science and judgement!

[Mihai]

As do I!!!

[balt]

So what's the status at Nextlimit as far as CUDA support for Maxwell is concerned? Any plans? Announcements? Hopes?

Cheers

- Balt