I have a growing list of things that do not seems to be working correctly, or that work non-optimally. But I haven't heard a peep since Eovia merged with DAZ. Not even a hint of a reply to the last bug report I sent in. Is there anyone even there who might be tightening up the current Mac version? I will be upfront and say that I have not encountered many global failures. The program has never crashed, although it has locked up a handful of times. I also haven't seen too many clearly wrong and quite fatal bugs....the habit of removing all group names from a polygon mesh while in the middle of editing same is one, though. Most of what I have falls more into performance issues. Such as the overly aggressive pop-up behavior on select and camera tools (try to drag the track ball, and before the camera gets over it's inertia and actually starts moving, the silly little "change the tracking type" selection pops up -- and stops the camera movement dead until you page back to your original selection. Similar with dragging a large object in the Assembly Room.) Or the default behavior of the cylindrical UVmap -- a behavior that can not be avoided if you ever have the misfortune to edit a closed object. But I'm having the strong feeling I'm being written off as a crank. Apparently you aren't supposed to find problems with Carrara. At this point I do not know if it is worth the time, effort, and aggravation to make out a proper bug report -- on anything! -- and send it in. Anyone, have any words of support? Any different experience to report (re getting things fixed)?

nomuse,
The setup is different now with the bug reporter. However, from what I have seen they are still working on Carrara. C6 beta, bugs and suggestions. This late in the game I don't know about another patch for mac tho, before c6. Doubtful.

Well, they've had my most critical notes for about eight months now. So if they aren't in a patch already, it ain't happening. Doesn't exactly inspire me to buy C6 when it comes out, though. I will definitely be reading the list of changes and improvements carefully. (And no way in heck will I be fooled by that "pre-release" joke again. They offer a pre-release beta, and I'm in like a flash. A "we'll ship it, sometime after we sell the company and offer the program for two bucks to Poser users" is NOT in the cards.)

Yes, it's hard to make Carrara crash and that's a very good thing. :) By definition, everyone that uses software is a crank when things don't work as expected. The way it seemed to work in Beta 4 and 5 was that some bug fixes (usually the annoying ones) were rolled into the next version. Serious bugs that fail operations or crash the program are dealt with in patches. Some seemingly "simple" bugs actually have required substantial code rewriting. In fact, there were a couple I was aware of from v3 that weren't remedied until v5 because they were nestled so close to the core that fixing them meant retooling how things were done throughout the application. Up to release 5 there was no word of making a UB version for the Mac (an unscientific survey went out asking how important UB was - I think you can find it in a thread here in fact.) The UB porting has all been done after the V5 release and it's no small task. (Just for comparison, Adobe isn't even planning on releaseing UB versions until spring/summer 07) So, my guess would be that core functionality and porting to MacIntel has taken precendent over lesser bugs up to this point. If I remember correctly, new functionality was coming at the beta testers like crazy 8 months ago - all with new bugs to work out. And bless their hearts, the development team loves new features. Next was cleaning up everything in the new features for the Gold Master. I've been involved in other beta cycles for software completely different than 3D stuff but the bug/feature/upgrade methodology seems to be the same for those as well. We can all agree that new features and old bug fixes never come fast or clean enough! :D

Been two version numbers for the group names bug....three for the UV mapping problem (been there as long as the UV mapper!) and umpteen for the selection glitch -- since that goes back to Ray Dream, I assume it's hard-coded deep into the software. To their credit, several things got fixed in 5 that weren't even listed in the "things we fixed" list. Is so much more of a pleasure to use I hate going back to 4 now. I know it's a lot to ask a software company to step away from highly marketable NEW toys and put effort behind getting the old ones to work right. But it is precisely when slogging through a heavy model in version 5 that I have to ask if the user base they are hearing most from really goes beyond importing Vickie, hitting the "instant sky" button, and rendering away.