DeleD Community Edition

[jwatte]

As you all know, I've always thought DeleD shouldn't be doing animation, because it's a complex feature, and it's not something that strengthens DeleDs current market, which is level building.

Thinking back about it, I think I'm quite right: There hasn't been a DeleD release in FOREVER, and some bad bugs are still present in the level modeling features. For example, the corruption of UV coordinates when using CSG, and when using Optimize, are WAY overdue for a fix. It's really not possible to develop a full level in DeleD right now, because once you texture and use a level, you will find areas that need re-work in geometry.

Comments from our friends the developers?

[Starnick]

*Cough* Three threads down

[Jeroen]

It has indeed been a long time since the last release, which was last march. We usually release a new version in 3 to 4 months, which makes about 3 to 4 releases a year (not counting quick bug-fix releases).

For 2008, we decided to concentrate on animation, a secret new feature and refactoring parts of DeleD so it's ready for future enhancements. We estimated it would take the rest of the year to get to where we want DeleD to be and we told the community about it pronto. We're not going to make that due to our busy personal life (dayjob primarily) though, and now we hope to release DeleD 2.0 in the first quarter of 2009. Not bad, given the enourmous changes we have made to the sources. More than we thought we would actually.

All in all, we're on track. Next release within a few months from now (hopefully february). After that, the rest of 2009 will be spend on the issues you mentioned + enhancing the new features. No major new features are planned for 2009. We're not going to debate whether or not animation should be a part of DeleD; we've had that discussion. Instead, the little time we have is spend on the actual implementation, which I'm sure everybody will understands.
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[Mr.Fletcher]

I initially wanted to answer this thread first, but now I click on reply I see there already are two answers. Damn you all!
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[Starnick]

Personally I can't wait till animation comes out. It'll certainly round out my pipeline. It won't make deled the killer app for the highly trained modellers/animators who go with maya or 3ds, but I'll bet it'll attract more folks outside the level making community who need a low-cost, but well rounded modeling suite.

[jwatte]

There is already such a tool, and it's cheaper than DeleD: It's Milkshape.
Personally, I just want DeleD to actually work for what I'm trying to use it for: level building. Right now, it doesn't actually allow me to finish a level, because of the CSG and UV problems.

[MeinenM]

I dont see why many of you guys cant seem to 'finish' your levels....Deled has all the features i need right now...optimize goes a little wacky at times but besides that its good...and i really think animation would be a great tool to open up Deled's audience range

[jwatte]

[elementrix]

and it's an odd work flow, I barely see people first assigning materials to objects and then shaping them, also in maya CSG (booleans) routines destroy the UV's (kinda, you will need to reUV them to make them good again), because it's pretty impossible to maintain UV's when new poly's are made.
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[Mr.Fletcher]

I don't understand, what's the point of this thread? Is this some kind of "I told you so" post? No offence, but as you said, we all heard you and listened to your complains about not wanting animation and such, but we already knew that months ago. What now?
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[Jeroen]

Everybody is entitled to his/her opinion, of course, and I can certainly understand opinions that are different from ours. There's just no need to repeat the discussion we've had some time ago. Let's avoid a flame war or something and concentrate on getting things done.
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[jwatte]

So let me answer the new question:

[Daaark]

BTW, Have you found out what bone weights are yet?
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[jwatte]

Now that's a random question if I ever saw one!

Whom are you asking? And in what context? Referring back to what other post (given the "yet")?

[jwatte]

There are two ways of making money on a software product.

1) Build a good product that solves the needs of some people well. Those people become your core customers, and they will evangelize for you. Using the revenue you get, you slowly expand the feature set of the product to serve more and more people, making sure that the people you already serve stay happy and aren't lured away to another product. You make money through upgrades/subscriptions among current users, and through aquiring more users/subscribers over time.
You can even build a community, where your users start helping each other, and build secondary businesses on top of your own product. That's great, because it adds value to your own product -- some user may need the feature of the secondary add-on, which means that user will pay money to both you and your secondary developer.

2) Build a product that fills a lot of checkboxes for the price. Get curious people to buy it. Use revenues to add more checkboxes. Let online feature list comparisons do your selling. Each time you add more checkboxes, make sure that those checkboxes look flashy, so that new users are tempted to buy. You make money by continually finding new users to pay your entry fee, because old users are unlikely to pay any more than they already did.
The community is built up of the people who bought the product in the last three months, because anyone who tried the product eventually end up losing interest, or running into unsolvable roadblocks.

Initially, I really thought DeleD was in the first category, because it had such a simple UI for building pretty good levels -- there just were a few bugs to fix (CSG, UV mapping and the leaks in the shadow mapping). However, here we are, years later, and those small bugs are still not fixed, whereas we've gone for a very long time waiting for a new whiz-bang checkbox feature that is unlikely to actually solve a real problem for real people. I have to conclude that DeleD really is in category 2), which is a shame. The world needs a well supported, affordable 3D game level geometry building program. Sketch-up isn't it, and Blender isn't either.

Not only has Milkshape done skinning and animation for a long time, but it has also done four-bones-per-vert skinning for a long time -- and the price is half that of DeleD.

However, the real competitor is likely to come from Autodesk and Microsoft. Microsoft has bought and made available for free TrueSpace 7.6. It's a product that does animation better than DeleD is likely to ever do (because it's been around for a long time), and it also does modeling, rendering, etc. And it's a free download.

There is also the XSI Mod Tool, released by Autodesk. It used to not be possible to use for commercial purposes, but Autodesk just recently changed the license for XNA Game Studio such that you can use it (also a free download!) to commercially release games. XSI is one of the absolute top notch applications in the world when it comes to animation, and while Mod Tool doesn't have all of the full product, it has a whole lot.