how much longer for 2015 OSX builds of 2.x???

[3Dmotif]

Been quite a while, are we gonna ever get 2015 OSX builds for 2.x Last time I asked it was as soon as a Mountain lion dev machine was setup. Well clearly it has been since there are Vray 3.x build for OSX under 2015. How much longer?

[t.petrov]

As far as I can see there is a 2.40.02 build for Maya 2015 OSX on the site.
Are you looking for something else?

[ivaylo.ivanov]

We will setup a machine to do also nightly builds after the VRay 3.0 release, but it doens't need to be said, it's quite of extra work like all other OSX related stuff, and falls behind the other OSs. For now you must use the official 2.4 or 3.0 beta.

[xxc]

it's quite of extra work like all other OSX related stuff, and falls behind the other OSs.

As I know the OSX "related stuffs" are not freeware.... You are selling it, same thing for linux stuffs... so please don't complain for extra work.... we paid for that!
Made us happy like any other customer... it's the universal business rule.
sheer

[vlado]

There are official builds for Maya 2015 on the Mac on the web site. Beyond that, we generally do not make any guarantees about the nightly builds - they are provided on an "as is" basis and we explicitly state that they may not be suitable for production purposes. When and what goes into the nightly builds is something that we cannot promise officially.

On the whole, developing for the Mac has been an extremely frustrating experience and the resources that we spend to support those builds are completely unjustified compared to the number of actual Mac users. I understand your frustration too, and we are working on the Mac builds, it's just a very slow process.

Best regards,
Vlado

[xxc]

developing for the Mac has been an extremely frustrating experience

Hi Vlado...

Can you explain on this?
I think people would like to know.... same for me.

Thanks
xxc

[vlado]

Can you explain on this?

There are a few things related to that; one is the frequent changes that Apple do their OS. If you want to start a few years ago, there was the PowerPC, which was a real pain, along with the fat binaries and forked files. Then there was the removal of the Carbon API for 64-bit programs - it took years for wxWidgets (the toolkit that we use for the V-Ray VFB) to catch up and just recently it is becoming possible to show it in the standalone. You can't compile on one Mac OS X version and have your program running on different versions. This means that in order to do builds for different Maya versions, we need to keep around several different Mac machines that would do the builds for a particular Maya version. The way services are registered and run changed several times in the recent Mac OS versions, causing us problems with the V-Ray license server. Our lead developer for V-Ray for Maya lost two weeks trying to install Mac OS Mavericks (which, by the way, is not available for online purchase in Bulgaria - Lon from our US office had to buy it from his account, but then it wouldn't want to download, because he had an older Macbook and it told him that it wasn't compatible etc etc). Their compiler and linker tools have bugs - it is an issue in the linker tool that prevented us from releasing 2015 builds for a very long time; in the end it turned out that it optimized away portions of code that are actually needed, so V-Ray would crash whenever it got to them. We still have mystery crashes in certain situations that we cannot explain in any way other than wrong code generated by the compiler. Their OpenCL never worked fine even to this day and no-one knows whose fault it is - AMD, nVidia or Apple; at the same time, CUDA is very unstable. And so on...

Best regards,
Vlado

[xxc]

Thanks for the answer...
It seem to be a mess....
Hope there is at least some few positives stuffs.

Thanks anyway
xxc