I ask this question every year. It helps me and other developers to understand what version we have to focus on
Thank you for your participation
PS. If you expect to go to new version soon please pick both current and future versions
Who is this forum for? I do not understand why it continues to exist at all. Sixty people looked at this post and only six people answered a simple question …
Sadly … but the forum dies
No sense to ask developers about used version.
Most of us use a versions from max 8 up to 20xx.
i don’t think so. most of people on this forum uses only one version. for example i don’t support any version earlier than 2014 anymore because of only few people still work on early versions
These’re not true devs.
Over the years this forum section has turned into the maxscript wiki. Greatest on the planet earth. So here’s plenty of visitors.
now we have some numbers… at the time of writing this post they are:
< 2016 : 7
2016 : 5
2017 : 4
2018 + : 10
what does it say?
first of all we can see that most of the people already moved to recent versions. The big difference is those versions are Qt UI. For developers it means that if you in the process of some tool development you have to understand that more than 50% of your users will work with new UI. To support both old and new UI might make your development more complicated.
the second – is that we still have many users with version < 2016. To support them we have a problem with pretty big sdk changes. So if you use c++ sdk you should be ready to support old sdk and look for some workaround to implement new features which came with 2016+
the third – is that some people use 2017. it’s not good at all. version 2017 is intermediate between winapi UI to Qt. Unfortunately this version is completely unpromising from the point of view of development. The Qt UI used in this version is very different than it used in 2018+
My personal suggestion to who uses 2017 is not stick with this version, and go up as soon as possible. This version is absolutely uninteresting for development (IMHO)
Another big change from 2014 is that we no longer need to support 32-bit versions.
I use 2017 myself.
Does 2018+ only support Qt? Or does it still support legacy Win32, it’s just that Qt is better?
I hope that Autodesk will explain it well, but what I see …
The original MAX UI is still based on Win32, but the native rollout controls are now displayed using Qt. They are not real Qt objects, they are only drawn using Qt graphics.
In 2018+, you can create a real Qt interface (dialog and widgets). But the use of Qt in the built-in MAX UI (plugins, utilities, materials, etc.) is limited in the same way as when you use .NET or WPF controls (where is no simple param-control-param binding mechanism)
but I can be mistaken … the 2018+ is still not my high priority vesrions