Version 5 Announcement

[gwhite]

I agree 100% with Doug as well. The latest message from S3D was nice, in that it indicated that they were at least still a functioning company. However, it was also infuriating in the repeated lack of ANY concrete information.

If the company has been busy helping with the pandemic, all they would had to do is announce that back in March or April, and I think a lot of the complaints that have been posted in the last 4 months would have evaporated. I'm sure the user base is heavily populated with technology professionals who understand slipped development schedules all too well. Stop treating us like children. In fact, S3D might be wise to involve us in the process by (for example) posting a poll to prioritize new features so they could focus on the stuff we really want & not on rarely used exotic bells & whistles.

Unless they have some super slick features that they want to keep under their hat, the LEAST S3D should do is provide a list of the features they are planning (not guaranteeing) to add to V5. People are abandoning the product not because of the delayed release of V5, but because there has been no credible indication that the company is still functioning, even actually working on it, or is anything more than S3D-Chris answering queries on the forum.

[billyd]

You must have a build of the new version. Release it as beta and let us help with the debug.

[Matt-]

The behaviour is quite strange. As others have said, I have no problem with delays, etc. But to just remain silent -- and delete fair concerns and questions -- does nothing for community engagement.

The difficult part for them will be expecting people to pay for the upgrade (remember: your license only entitled you to a year of free upgrades) after the poor treatment of paying customers on 4.x. What was an automatic purchase is now, at least for me, a risky consideration.

[jaymcd]

Hey Chris,

I have sent this in to support. Does this suggest that there is a beta to test or ...??

[billyd]

Support replied they don't need beta testers.

[gcreate3d]

Beta tester

We have contacted S3D several times to beta test with our machines (which we recommend people use S3D) and been bet with silence.

[3DWP]

Yeah to me too, they have a lot of users available for testing and I am added to the list

Too bad..

[garvyman]

Could someone point me to the post/reply suggesting how to be a beta tester? I can't seem to find it.

[S3D-Jake]

We can certainly understand the frustration and I can assure you we’re working as hard as we can to get the details surrounding the release of V5 finalized. As a quick update, I'd like to let you know that earlier this month we performed a lengthy series of updates to our larger backend systems in preparation for the release. So while the pandemic may have slowed us down there has certainly been some significant progress now that things are stabilizing.

I'm also in the product development/innovation field, so I know how easy it is for things to snowball....

Having the worldwide COVID pandemic occur right in the middle of our largest product development effort yet was certainly tough to anticipate. It admittedly slowed us down, but we’re proud of our decision to support the community's effort to give back during a time of crisis and confident the release of V5 is going to be Simplify3D's greatest yet.

....
If the company has been busy helping with the pandemic, all they would had to do is announce that back in March or April, and I think a lot of the complaints that have been posted in the last 4 months would have evaporated.
....

We’ve been posting information about our COVID work on our blog (https://www.simplify3d.com/blog/) and social channels since early April, but I can certainly appreciate that it would have been helpful to post more of those updates here on the forum. We're adding more official Simplify3D employees to help provide more responses to our power users on our forum going forward.

You must have a build of the new version. Release it as beta and let us help with the debug.

We’ve already performed several rounds of testing internally. In accordance with Simplify3D's development standards we like to make sure things are pretty robust before we do any external testing.

....
Rather than giving your existing customers the same old same old news, why can't you give some form of real progress report on v5?? Surely there are some key points that can be released to whet our appetites. An indication of how the new version will differ from the current software; what any new features will be, and some real indication of when the release will be.
....

While we aren’t ready to share the exact features list yet, what I can tell you is that the company does a great job reviewing and compiling the feature suggestions from this forum. That played a huge role in the features that were selected for the release, so I’m confident many of the features will be familiar to our users.

As always, we value and appreciate our users' honest feedback. It’s been a significant guiding hand in the direction we’ve taken the product and the features we're working on adding.

[percar]

Thanks for the update. I know you cant give an exact timeline for the release but could you give a hint as to the timeline that you are working towards