I see a total desolation on all CGTalk branches. Max, Maya … everywhere…
Honestly, I’m not interested here anymore.
The professional’s talking is absolutely gone.
Questions asked here are mostly in the style of REDDIT … simply – “can someone answer”
What the f *ck is going on?
Do we need another resource, or is there a chance to return everything to the old rails?
But the forum is at least still available. It just needs some professionals talking
My observation over many years on the matter: Communities lives from the beginners and advanced users. The beginners contributes 95% of the questions. The advanced users answers 95% of the questions. And leave at one point because there is no benefit and gain left for them anymore. That’s a pretty normal behaviour at a community page. And all is fine as long as enough newbies arrives that progresses from beginner to advanced. Usually a user at a community page is active for 3 to 5 years.
The fatal part is that fewer and fewer beginners enters forum communities in general. Which is nowadays also pretty normal, in all forum based communities. You find your answers at Youtube, Facebook, etc. . A forum as a community is just one of many possibilities nowadays. It has become a niche. And most question are answered already.
But i don’t think that a forum community in general will ever become obsolete. Google can just find what exists. And that’s in big parts still forum posts.
That the current forum software here sucks in many ways is another matter then …
Sure, it would be great to have a dedicated mxs-wiki site, but I don’t know anyone motivated enough to create one.
It is sad to see that this great place became so useless. But even in this state most of the time it is enough to goolge the answer.
I believe that those who is able to ask serious question search for the answer first, so it is unlikely to have a discussion if the answer already exists and thread is locked (what’s the point to lock it?). Turns out that the more answers we have – less questions we have
denisT, I’ve gone through so many threads in the maxscript section over the years, and what you have contributed is seriously beyond words. You’ve shared so many insights, so many complex and awesome solutions to problems that would be impossible for “the normal guy” to figure out (as there’s no documentation, and very few people who know).
I mean, I know like five nicknames on this site, and those I know is the one’s who seem to provide solutions to 90% of the problems (and 100% of the hard problems). I totally get why that is kinda demotivating And people who don’t even put in the slightliest of work, and don’t even bother to say “thank you”, honestly they don’t deserve someone else to solve their problem.
I don’t know, but I think a smaller forum could help the community aspect. I don’t know why, but I’ve often seen small dedicated forums have great communities. I think it’s partly because it’s easier to enforce rules, people asking dumb questions and not putting in any work quickly learns that that’s not the way to go.
In regards to the absence of professionals, I think professionals are leaving 3dsMax, it seems it’s slowly dying (it can’t offer anything to jump ahead of it’s competition). Also what Serehah is mentioning is great points, I’ve never understood why threads gets locked.
I don’t know man, but if you decide to leave, I would just have you know that what you’ve contributed here is probably appreciated immensely more that you know. Of everyone I’ve talked to that knows anything about maxscript, all of them knows who you are. It would be extremely sad to see you go
It’s true but not completely true.
I’m right know developping in C# SDK a complex program where I have needed:
- Lots of math (bisection, Newton-Raphson, Simpon’s integration, Hamilton paths…)
- SDK C# undo / redo
- SDK C# serialize/deserialize, keep dotnetObject in scene
- SDK C# node changed callbacks
- SDK C# lots of UVW mapping coordinates
- SDK C# splines over surface creation.
- …
All these can be usefull algorithms for C++ SDK or Maxscript.
I have thounsands of questions that I’m solving taking hours and hours to get a solid answer. Why don’t I ask here? Really no reason or a lot of ones…
Basicaly, I don’t like users behaviour. As DenisT has said, the professional talking is absolutely gone. So, should I post my code just to help someone else to copy it? Because when I post my code with a question, there are just two possibilities: no answer or an answer from someone to whom I can ask the question directly by private. Why shall I do it public? Why should I give my work to those who do not deserve it?
You know, few months ago I was here helping directly someone in a a public thread. He was delighted because I give to him a solution to his problem (that took me days of work) so now he was able to go on with his C# SDK plugin. At one point of the thread, I got stuck in a point to go on with the plugin development. It was his time to help me. His answer was: sorry, it’s a professional work, I can’t give you the code, I will try to give you an snippet… till today. Of course, I knew from the first minute he wouldn’t help me.
So… what can I expect from people other than @denisT, @Klvnk, @PolyTools3D, @Serejah, @miauu, @Swordslayer, @Malkalypse, MZ, lo (and few others I forget, not more than five)? A B S O L U T E L Y N O T H I N G.
If we want serious help and implication, I think it is necessary to create a new forum restricted to trusted users:. people who don’t mind to share code with others and ready to spend their time for others. Perhaps not good programmers, but serious.
And leave this forum to help people whenever you want. By my side, every day I have less desire to help and share with strangers.
It seems to me that this site was gradually transformed from a site for professionals to some social network, which changed the rules of the site.
First it was removed the information on the date of registration on the site, then the posts counter and their frequency.
Perhaps this is some kind of social networking rule that I don’t know, but I needed this information in order to understand how to communicate with a specific participant.
This privacy has led to a decrease in the degree of responsibility of participation in the discussions of the site.
Participants appeared with unprepared questions and without feedback.
It is not interested for me to answer such questions, because in most cases this does not entail any discussion or exchange of opinions.
I have already said many times that I myself am learning on this site, finding answers to questions that I just sometimes did not think of. But the process turned into a one-way street.
And this was not only happened in the 3DS Max’s branch, but Maya’s branch as well.
I stopped asking professional questions here, so as not to embarrass some of the participants. It is inconvenient for them not to answer my question, but to share ideas and findings with everyone is meaningless. And I understand these people well.
I can say frankly that many interesting questions flowed into Private.
I had been asked many questions in Private before, but I often asked to transfer the discussions to an open area … But I don’t see the point do it now.
I do not think that 3DS MAX is dying … It will be in demand for many more years. I see an increasing interest in using the SDK in the 3DS MAX tools development. There are many problems and related issues on working with c ++, C #, Python, and Qt. There is still a lot to discuss, but it seems that it is no longer on this resource …
Yeah I wonder why they removed that (registered/postcount/frequency/karma), I always appreciated that information on whichever forum I visited. Removing that is (in a way) like removing experience from your CV. I think the social media aspect is a great point, I’ve never thought about that, but I see the same kind of thing seemingly happening everywhere
You might be right about 3dsMax, I just get the impression more and more people are getting sick of Autodesk (with good reason imo). I know that studios still use Maya and 3dsMax, but I’ve also heard about some of the smaller studios talking about switching to Blender as their main package. There’s so many alternatives, people already do a lot of stuff outside of their main 3d software (like retopo, texturing, uv’s, simulations etc). I don’t know
Anyway, it really sucks that the incentive for people like yourselves is gone. I would imagine similar issues has been raised around here, I wonder why they havent tried to turn the ship in the right direction
even a non-coder like me would give you 2 thumbs up Doc.
Dunno what it is with the new design, I used to have a peek in the maxscript forum now and then…even as a non-coder…you could still learn something…but now I don’t anymore…it’s something in the new/shitty ‘design’…
Looks like it’s all downhill from here.
The “Traffic Analysis” is meaningful. September is just when the forum’s design changed.
But I’m really sure that this is not the real problem but something that has reinforced the general feeling.