Status of 3D Nature Mac Development

The recent controversial changes in the Mac world have necessitated 3D Nature making a statement about the future of our Mac development.

3D Nature no longer believes it will be capable of delivering a MacOS X version of our World Construction Set and Visual Nature Studio products.

This decision is as painful for us as it is for our Mac customers. We have spent enormous amounts of effort and resources to bring this product to fruition, which we will never recoup. From a purely business standpoint, this is terrible. But, from an ideological standpoint, we are disappointed too. As original advocates of alternative platforms (having started on the very non-mainstream Amiga!) we have always supported our customers' choice to use the computer/OS platform that was best suited for their work.

Unfortunately, this has not always been a commercial success. The Mac market accounts for 16% of gross computer installations, by recent estimates. The Mac 3D/Landscape/GIS market is even smaller. Though we've never really done the math, we suspect 3D Nature has always lost money on the Mac, but we felt it was still worth supporting.

Some might say that our aging OS9 port on the Mac hasn't helped the situation, and we would agree. If we could have it any other way, we would. Allow me to explain the situation we face.

Why is it so hard to make quality software on both Mac and Windows? It's not the internal code we write for WCS and VNS. All of that is designed to be completely portable. It's the user interface. This is where operating systems differentiate themselves. Sure, on the surface they look like they do about the same thing, but underneath, it's how they do things that differ so radically.

But there is another culprit that we never suspected. You see, computer/OS manufacturers don't WANT software makers producing portable, multiplatform software. They want to lock you in to their platform. This strengthens their hold on their users, preventing them from casually switching. Apple, as well as Microsoft are guilty of this.

Technical Information

For those who are interested in the real reasons for this, read on. Others may not care about the next two paragraphs.

With both OSes, in order to do anything other than a couple of simple buttons in a window, you need to delve into advanced (and obscure) programming libraries which even force you to adopt programming styles unique to their programming environment. On Windows, Microsoft wanted you to use MFC -- the Microsoft Foundation Classes. These are a toolkit of code that makes the "real" Windows Win32 capabilities somewhat intelligible. Using the raw Win32 APIs is a nightmare of strange functions and data types. However, using MFC completely alters the structure of your program to be MFC-centric, making it almost impossible to port. 3D Nature has always avoided MFC for this reason. In recent years, MFC has waned -- now Microsoft advocates a new toolkit (WinForms) and even a whole new language (C# or Managed C++) to further lock users into Microsoft platforms.

Apple is no more innocent. We were making good progress back on OS9. But, when OSX came out, it heralded a whole new paradigm. OSX is built on the Cocoa toolkit, which primarily uses Objective C -- a whole similar-but-different take on object-oriented programming in a C-like language. All of 3D Nature's code is in C++. MacOSX offers the old 'Carbon' library for those who don't want to use Objective-C and Cocoa, but like Microsoft, not every OS feature or capability is easily accessible from Carbon.

Apple and Microsoft care little for developers who don't want to use their proprietary toolkits to create software. 3D Nature is the black sheep in both worlds, because we don't adopt the local customs, wanting to have a more neutral flavor amenable to all.

Large companies, in markets where the Mac is strong (DTP) are able to cope with this by maintaining their own substantial staff of in-house programmers with the sole job of smoothing over all of these differences. Adobe, Macromedia, Newtek and Alias all have their own in-house toolkits that hide the differences of the various platforms. This generally causes their applications to have a completely unique look and feel, different from either platform.

Unfortunately, 3D Nature is not this kind of big company, and as mentioned above, we don't see substantial enough Mac market share to justify this development. As a result, we have always developed our software on and for Windows. We use a variety of tools and libraries to redirect most of the Windows-specific UI code into the Mac equivalents, and rewrite individually what could not be redirected systematically. The library we used previously for OS9 support was discontinued by the manufacturer years ago, and did not include source, so we had to start over for OSX.

For the past few years, we have partnered with another small (but more Mac-involved) multiplatform developer to create a new library to replace it. We've had one programmer working on this project for almost the entire time. While our MacOSX version has compiled and (tried to) run for quite some time, too many remaining significant issues persist. It is not in a usable form, and probably will not be in the foreseeable future. It is beyond our Mac expertise to take it the rest of the way. We, the entire staff of 3D Nature, sat down to discuss the fate of our Mac support and determined that we cannot continue.

The current upheaval in the Mac world is not the direct cause of our decision, but it throws one more roadblock into our path.

Future Support

What then, from here?

We have limited ability to support our current OS9 users. We still have an OS9 computer that runs. Our development tools targeting OS9 no longer operate, so we cannot issue new bug fixes or new versions for OS9. We are aware of numerous small issues with the OS9 version which cannot now be fixed. There will now not be a Scene Express for MacOS9.

We are immediately discontinuing sales of our Mac products, as we do not feel we should sell a product that we cannot offer our customary full support for.

Offer to Mac Customers

What can we do to help our existing Mac customers?

We will immediately offer current WCS 6 and VNS 2 Mac owners an exchange of your Mac license for a Windows license, should you choose to follow that route. In fact, while we would normally require you to send back your Mac hardware key, we will not require this. You can keep your Mac license and get a Windows license as well. We hope this will ease the migration process.

(Cross-graded Mac licenses cannot be resold independently).

This platform exchange is available for only $100 plus shipping.

Effective immediately, we can really only provide limited Mac platform support. We will do our best, as always, but can't guarantee anything. We have set a date of May 31st, 2006 as the final end-of-support for our Mac products.

We hope that by making this choice, we will be able to better refocus our efforts into creating and improving the products the majority of our customers use, instead of spreading ourselves so thinly that we're not helping anyone.

In the end, the final decision was mine, as VP of Research and Development. I apologize personally to those who won't find this decision to your liking, and believe me when I say I actually do understand how this is going to affect you. While the Mac platform is growing and thriving, it isn't for 3D Nature, and we have to admit the realities of technology and business that have led us to this eventuality.

You are welcome to e-mail me privately if you have concerns about this, but there really isn't any factor that can change our decision at this point.

Sincerely,

Chris "Xenon" Hanson