I'm not a sloppy codebase Maxon basher either. Just harping on their really bad publicly stated choice of reasons for why they are doing what they are doing.
Really, what they have is a business decision to not continue their current OS X front-end mated to their newer 64-bit back-end. And they are letting a half-cocked QA shop guy be their mouthpiece. And he's put his foot in it rather badly.
1) If they are lamenting Aqua is not 64-bit they are already telegraphing their GUI code is not cross platform, taking the wind out of the "we can't do code with differences" argument altogether.
or
2) If they are doing their own completely custom GUI with no OS support to stay completely cross platform neutral, then they don't need Apple OS GUI code for that. I can only see one potential difficulty and a couple ways past that. They may not allow ridiculously high framerates in an interactive display window, but I can't see why they would have to go below 60, especially on a SMP box. Bye bye show-stopper problem possibility two.
Either way there is a certain amount of platform specific tweaking they would have to do for the front end and they are now saying they CANNOT make that work with a 64-bit backend. IMNSHO that is BS. I will accept that they don't want to invest ANY extra effort to make it work, but personally think that effort is MUCH smaller than they estimate. Not to mention it would set them up for a much easier transformation to Avalon, despite what the MVC haters would like you to think.
NSResponder hierarchy (Windows and Views amongst others) and their Carbon equivalents are 32-bit and won't accept 64-bit pointer referenced information so it makes it a little more involved to put that out to the display. Not that bad as there are a couple ways you can do it depending on desires and what you need the display region to do interaction-wise, and at least one of them shouldn't incur any substantial performance penalties.
Well, we seem to have found the REAL reason Cinema4D wont be ported to 64-bit PPC.
Quote:
MAXON Computer today announced support for Apple's upcoming Intel-based architecture (IA). "Apple's announcement is good news for a cross-platform developer like MAXON. Since our products' source code is over 95% platform-independent, it can be ported very quickly. In addition, Intel has always proven to be a very flexible and dedicated partner," said MAXON CTO Harald Schneider. "CINEMA 4D has been leading a "secret double life" as an Xcode version for a while. To that end, the first internal Universal Binaries for Intel- and PowerPC-based Apple machines are already compiled in our labs."
I still think the QA twerp needs to have his head squeezed, talking out his ass like that. Just fall back on the "Wwe will have an announcement on a future product at the appropriate time" routine. Don't make bogus technical shit up. It was a purely business decision and appears to have been a decent one given the new information.
Even though the G5 processors of the Apple Power Mac series are 64-Bit CPUs, 64-Bit applications are not entirely supported by the OS X operating system. Only command line based programs can take advantage of the 64-Bit memory adressroom. Programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) can only run in 32-Bit mode. Therefore we can unfortunately not offer a 64-Bit version of CINEMA 4D for Macintosh. More information on this topic can be found here:
I Dont want to pop your bubble but GUIs are just a front end, wll the heavy lifting is done by what is essentialy a commandlike app, you seeno command line but think of each button on the app being a command or switch ijn a command line app
Well, we seem to have found the REAL reason Cinema4D wont be ported to 64-bit PPC.
I still think the QA twerp needs to have his head squeezed, talking out his ass like that. Just fall back on the "Wwe will have an announcement on a future product at the appropriate time" routine. Don't make bogus technical shit up. It was a purely business decision and appears to have been a decent one given the new information.
Just because it has been living a secret Xcode life doesn't mean that Maxon knew anything about the transition to Intel.
Only a very few at Adobe knew and they are much bigger.
You want me to believe they built the app and then said they had killed it on OS X because they were precluded from doing 64-bit GUIs? Then say three weeks later we have had it building on OS X for a long time and we have a Universal Binary today to boot? They could not have built it in the first place if the technical issues that the idiot QA guy cited were true. But the issues weren't true, because they HAVE built it. So why else would they be sitting on a working program that might make them a lot of $$, unless the things that they are waiting for are dependent on OSX on Intel, like OS agnostic x86 optimizations.
They (Maxon management) knew what was coming and told the software team to develop it. They just didn't tell the whole dev team the whole story, there was no need to. Now they have a year and a half or so to get the OSX on Intel version polished without having to maintain a second CPU optimization branch.
Comments
For those areas that's really all you need.
Really, what they have is a business decision to not continue their current OS X front-end mated to their newer 64-bit back-end. And they are letting a half-cocked QA shop guy be their mouthpiece. And he's put his foot in it rather badly.
1) If they are lamenting Aqua is not 64-bit they are already telegraphing their GUI code is not cross platform, taking the wind out of the "we can't do code with differences" argument altogether.
or
2) If they are doing their own completely custom GUI with no OS support to stay completely cross platform neutral, then they don't need Apple OS GUI code for that. I can only see one potential difficulty and a couple ways past that. They may not allow ridiculously high framerates in an interactive display window, but I can't see why they would have to go below 60, especially on a SMP box. Bye bye show-stopper problem possibility two.
Either way there is a certain amount of platform specific tweaking they would have to do for the front end and they are now saying they CANNOT make that work with a 64-bit backend. IMNSHO that is BS. I will accept that they don't want to invest ANY extra effort to make it work, but personally think that effort is MUCH smaller than they estimate. Not to mention it would set them up for a much easier transformation to Avalon, despite what the MVC haters would like you to think.
MAXON Computer today announced support for Apple's upcoming Intel-based architecture (IA). "Apple's announcement is good news for a cross-platform developer like MAXON. Since our products' source code is over 95% platform-independent, it can be ported very quickly. In addition, Intel has always proven to be a very flexible and dedicated partner," said MAXON CTO Harald Schneider. "CINEMA 4D has been leading a "secret double life" as an Xcode version for a while. To that end, the first internal Universal Binaries for Intel- and PowerPC-based Apple machines are already compiled in our labs."
I still think the QA twerp needs to have his head squeezed, talking out his ass like that. Just fall back on the "Wwe will have an announcement on a future product at the appropriate time" routine. Don't make bogus technical shit up. It was a purely business decision and appears to have been a decent one given the new information.
Originally posted by Sao_Bento
Note for Apple users
Even though the G5 processors of the Apple Power Mac series are 64-Bit CPUs, 64-Bit applications are not entirely supported by the OS X operating system. Only command line based programs can take advantage of the 64-Bit memory adressroom. Programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) can only run in 32-Bit mode. Therefore we can unfortunately not offer a 64-Bit version of CINEMA 4D for Macintosh. More information on this topic can be found here:
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/64bit.html
I Dont want to pop your bubble but GUIs are just a front end, wll the heavy lifting is done by what is essentialy a commandlike app, you seeno command line but think of each button on the app being a command or switch ijn a command line app
Originally posted by Hiro
Well, we seem to have found the REAL reason Cinema4D wont be ported to 64-bit PPC.
I still think the QA twerp needs to have his head squeezed, talking out his ass like that. Just fall back on the "Wwe will have an announcement on a future product at the appropriate time" routine. Don't make bogus technical shit up. It was a purely business decision and appears to have been a decent one given the new information.
Whoa, that's really great.
Originally posted by Hiro
Well, we seem to have found the REAL reason Cinema4D wont be ported to 64-bit PPC.
Just because it has been living a secret Xcode life doesn't mean that Maxon knew anything about the transition to Intel.
Only a very few at Adobe knew and they are much bigger.
The might as well do the coding as with probably won;t be that different.
It is the pentium D isn't it?
Dobby.
Originally posted by JLL
Just because it has been living a secret Xcode life doesn't mean that Maxon knew anything about the transition to Intel.
Only a very few at Adobe knew and they are much bigger.
You want me to believe they built the app and then said they had killed it on OS X because they were precluded from doing 64-bit GUIs? Then say three weeks later we have had it building on OS X for a long time and we have a Universal Binary today to boot? They could not have built it in the first place if the technical issues that the idiot QA guy cited were true. But the issues weren't true, because they HAVE built it. So why else would they be sitting on a working program that might make them a lot of $$, unless the things that they are waiting for are dependent on OSX on Intel, like OS agnostic x86 optimizations.
They (Maxon management) knew what was coming and told the software team to develop it. They just didn't tell the whole dev team the whole story, there was no need to. Now they have a year and a half or so to get the OSX on Intel version polished without having to maintain a second CPU optimization branch.