BA as just 'noise', perhaps the cause of mediocrity in user/dev. interaction?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

When you talk about users and devs relationship, you guys also need to understand that people like Ton also have the plan and forsee how Blender develops. That’s why some features don’t make it because their code might bug with something inside the main Blender code.

I would make the point that most of us users have 0 idea about the code infrastructure and only provide feedback formulated in single mini ideas.

Yeah, when in doubt the developer decides what goes in. That’s the one who has the big picture. And this is not the problem.

But …

When a feature that is proveable useful because all other 3D packages have it already, and which is even already proper implemented, doesn’t make it because the chairman says no in favour of a dream that might come true in 20 years or so, then this has nothing to do with internal code structure.

And this is not the only questionable decision. Just look at the UI. Revolution made quiet by “okay, we will fix it now” and then quietly forgotten.

And we have a community here that notices such things.

42

While I do understand the sentiment about users having more control over what gets committed to certain areas, you need to take into account that we shouldn’t be advocating for Ton, Brecht, Sergey et al. to become pushovers either (as in, completely stripping them of control over their code).

Ton has veto power with the interface, Brecht has veto power with Cycles, Sergey has the same with another area. Also, I haven’t seen any clear sign that Ton is against the idea of updating the interface at all, Psy-Fi for example if working on pie menus which is something that was actually on Ton’s todo list for his area.

Having a will and a vision for an area shouldn’t be condemned, because promoting the opposite means promoting the idea of a weak person with a weak mind.

43

I’ve been both a code-developer and a software project manager for … well, anyway … and I can say that Blender would be “the project from hell.” You have a very large number of interested-parties but a very, very small pool of active developers. So, if you want to make a material difference in how this amazing product goes, get your hands dirty. Get materially-involved in the development project. Maybe you write code, maybe you write docs, maybe you do testing, but … do​ something.

Remember also that software engineering has only one pre-eminent concern: the almighty product. Not persons or their minds. Not even personalities. At the end of the day, you once-again compile “this stinkin’ mass of source code” and exactly one of two things happens: either it works, or it does not. Few, if any, other forms of human endeavor are “so starkly and brutally binary.”

And … (shrug) … if you ever think you know what highly-visible software project management is really like … I suggest you “try it.”

44

@Ace Dragon, could you define negativity?

It almost seems like anything but complete agreement with the devs is termed negativity.

Critique/critisism/ideas to improve features and campains/requests for firm information/etc, I would call posotive and constructive. But I have seen those things referred to as negativity (gb thread). Labeling them negativity and noise allows them to be ignored without actually thinking about them or addressing them.

At the same time there is a fanboy contingent that I think also impedes progress with useless noise (“people just want everything for free”, etc)

Don’t get me wrong I’m a huge fanboy of blender and marvel at it daily, but I’m not going to dismiss someones concerns just because they don’t align with how I view blender.

I’m also a fan of Ton (the fact that he will give tours to people who stop by the BI is incredible) but I still think if he wants support from the community he may have to answer some harsh critisisms from time to time and not dismiss them as noise.

At some point I’d like to start a thread about how the BI can best leverage the community, and maybe we can come up with a concise guide for the BI to use to get our money :slight_smile: I think if GB was presented slightly differently it may have gotten more support.

There is a sticky about how not to be a fanboy, maybe there should be a sticky about how not to be negative/destructive?

45

Pie menus suck. Let’s add another useless feature instead of fixing the basic ones.

46

Argh come on Ace !

Ton is showing his power… haven’t done anything to back it up with good reasons or arguments to the community (after he effectively said no to Cambpells patch). And as far as I can tell (and so many have reacted to) doesn’t have a strong case at all for rejecting this feature (Colored Wireframe).

Showing power + silence + having a weak case = weakness

Which is a major major bummer, since we are talking about Ton Roosendaal here :

The Benevolent dictator for life in the Blender universe (he is even mentioned as the first person in the Wikipedia entry about the term). Doing these kind of things is the exact opposite of what is needed (so very needed) by a Benevolent dictator for life in a FOSS project.

I just hope (& cross my fingers) that the good Ton is about to give some well thought through feedback to the community to defuse this situation (and change the above equation).

47

do​ something.

You mean stuff like writing plugins that gets rejected then for no reason? Yup, been there :slight_smile:

48

Swearing is a starting point. Very few people get motivated by having their work called ‘shit’, at the the least not on a constant basis.

Melodrama is a second lesser form of swearing. ‘It will never happen, etc.’, ‘we are the proles, be we shall be the proles no longer’.

Us vs them wording is a third. ‘This person is the one that is at fault’, ‘we are being drowned out by the blender fanboys’, ‘we are being drowned out by the people criticising this feature’.

Pathos arguments ‘If you’d have any sense you’d know I was right’.

And overal little respect for the other person’s opinions, like, no empathy to actually try to stand in their shoes and acknowledge you understand where they are coming from.

Thankfully, my personal petpeeve, the imperative voice everywhere, is actually not all that common here.

Now, I am not for censoring these or anything, I like a little dramatic flair in my life, but it’s kinda like salt. A bit is tasy and makes you want to each more of the meal, too much makes you want to push away the meal and forget about having dinner.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I forgot psychoanalysing people over the internet. Now this is really common, with one member here being notorious for it. Unrelated to him, there’s people in the wireframe thread who instead of accepting what Cambell told them about being asked to focus on something else and him not wanting to work on the patch anymore anyway, they are saying he’s doing so because he’s been forced by boss.
Seriously guys, stop writing fanfiction about the developers.

49

Agreed 100 percent! I think we found a basis for the wording of the “don’t be noise” sticky :slight_smile:

50

I think your confirmation bias is showing…

51

gives you a hug :slight_smile:

52

The open movie teams are the beta teams. That is the development model for blender. This is why radical new stuff happens mostly during or in preparation of open movie projects, as during this time, the artists and devs are on location in amsterdam.

53

The owners approve changes which gives the a lot of power. They need this power, because they are two ones who are responsible to maintain the code, they are responsible that the bugs in that area are resolved and so on. They have the power, because they do the work an they have proven over years that they can do that.

54

I like the idea of rebuilding things from scratch on a weekend, and at the end of the weekend, if its not what we expeted, try again.

55

The pie menus will fix something, and that is the issue that the toolbar is not a very good place to invoke a number of operators due to its position on the edge of the viewport instead of where the selection is.

This has actually been requested by a number of users, and this is yet another reason why some deride BA as noise (which is that my opinion should be the one that matters so you can ignore everyone else’s).

I notice in the other thread that no one seems to be interested in anything outside of being bitter toward Ton, no alternative ideas, no compromises, nothing of that sort.

56

@BTolputt
Please don’t wall quote me, I don’t like it and it makes it difficult to have a discussion because the only way I can respond is to wall quote you back.

First of all donating to the BF or BI does not mean that they have any obligation to listen to your interests or demands, yes it might make sense if they did as it would increase the chances of you donating again but a donation is a donation not a “do what I say” token.

In the same way I donate to a political party, but I don’t complain if my party does not change its manifesto to better suit my needs I donate to a different party. You donate to BF or BI in the same way, if you don’t like it don’t donate. Donating does not buy you influence its solely to improve Blender “In a way that the head of the BF thinks is best”.

I think its incorrect to assume that this person would be at odds with Ton to start with! If this person was that good and did not agree with the direction of Blender why would they join the Blender community in the first place? But even if he/she did, if this person contributed as much code to Blender as Ton has and wanted to start doing things his own way he could just fork Blender. There would be no arguments or tears, it would be two skilled professionals going there separate ways.

Well for someone who wrote an entire post condemning users for lumping all users who voice any negativity together and ignoring them, you seem to be doing exactly that to thous who approve of the BF. For your information I am not “defending” the BF I am sharing my opinion. There are people who think that the BF is doing the right thing, regardless of how loud some users shout that Ton is wrong.

Just because something is not receiving money from the BF does not mean that its not part of the plans. The person working on the view port enhancements as part of the GSOC is not receiving money from the BF “as far as I know”, but they are an integral part of Blenders future plans.

57

instead of some of the IU things added it would be nice if blender
got something like a CAD facelift.(maybe like sketchup or Solidworks type workflow)

58

I think a large part of the noise is hyperbolic statements from all sides.:

“Blender is worthless because of RMB select”
“Gooseberry will change the world forever”
“Cycles is feature complete and can render everything imaginable”
“The depsgraph refactor will bring blender to the level of maya or 3dsmax”
“Ton is an iron-fisted overlord”

The loudest members of the forum are the most hyperbolic. All of the realists out there who think blender is pretty good, despite its numerous flaws, are completely washed out by the roar of people screaming that blender is the best/worst thing ever.

Blender is one of the most active, most developed open source projects out there. It is in no danger of collapsing in the foreseeable future. And no amount of forum noise is going to change that. If anything, the noise on this forum is most likely to result in a mediocre forum where the realistic people are constantly drowned out by the trolls and fanboys.

Ace, if you want to reduce the rabble on the forum, why would you try to rouse it with this thread? Just seems like feeding the trolls…

59

This is why I’ve referred to Blender as in-house software. The beta teams for most other comparable software consist of members from multiple studios with a variety of workflows, pipelines, and past experiences all using the software on different projects. Judging by their IMDB bios this has not been the case for people working on the past open movies. Probably the best thing about Gooseberry, as originally pitched, is that it would have gotten Blender in-front of more users with a wider variety of experiences with the potential to influence its development.

I don’t say this to diminish the contributions Ton and the other Blender leadership have made to making open source 3D content creation possible, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that when NaN failed commercially it morphed in to the Blender Foundation/Institute whose new business model for supporting development of their in-house tool was to collect donations rather than sell commercial products. So far that has worked out pretty well, however, it shouldn’t be a surprise that as more people start using your tool they are going to want to have more input in to how it functions. The project leadership need to find a balance between maintaining a strong vision for the tool while remaining humble enough to realize that the workflows they are accustomed to are not necessarily the only, or even the best, ways of accomplishing a given task.

60

Without exposing the whole gamut of reasons of why the devs. avoid BA (and see it as ‘too noisy’ to glean useful feedback from), how else might you try to get this forum back to where it was years ago when there actually was a lot of useful feedback that wasn’t being drowned out by ten to twenty pages of bitterness, disappointments, character bashing, and allegation of people being cognitively broken on a psychological level?

Even Johnathon W suffered a lot of negativity directed towards him when he proposed a way to try to get discussions into a more useful pattern, that should tell us something. This by no means is saying that I support the idea of being a blind apologist for Blender (because I too think there’s a lot of room for improvement), but when disagreement comes up you need to at least say it in a way that doesn’t try to destroy dignity.