When you report a Rhino bug, Pascal Golay responds within a few hours, verifies the bug, and reports it to programmers who fix the bug in a few months. When you report Flamingo bug, the most likely response is stonewalling. Why is Flamingo technical support so lousy?
The reality is because Flamingo has far fewer users, it has far fewer developers., They work on Flamingo in addition to Rhino and other projects so it’s a part-time effort for them. The product manager also works on Flamingo on a part-time basis. Those of us in tech support don’t use it very much because we get so many more Rhino questions. It has been very frustrating to try to truly learn due to the prolonged, resource-starved development, and so few people willing to do rigorous testing. Scott (product manager) has been the primary support focus for it. He just has lots of irons in the fire.
None of this is meant to be taken as an excuse. These are just the reasons Flamingo support has been spotty.
Few big companies have the resources to develop more than one renderer at the same time. Robert McNeel & Associates develops four renderers: native Rhino renderer, Brazil, Flamingo, and Penguin. Maybe it would be good idea to merge all those renderers into one or two programs?
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You can also add Neon and the new V6 render engine (blender’s cycles) to the list.
(And the OpenGL pipeline, and also Penguin)
Focusing on one engine makes lots of sense to me too.
And the advanced features could be unlocked by purchasing an additional license key.
Cinema4D has done this for years and it makes life easy for everybody. In example: If you want ToonShader then purchase the license, type it in and off you go as it is already installed on your system.
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