[osg-users] Announcement: VulkanSceneGraph and SceneGraphTestBed!

[Robert Osfield]

A short note on "The importance of working in a isolation."

This thread has been ended straying away from what I intended.  It was
announcement, and never intended to a discussion or technical issues
or wish-lists, personal preferences, from the community.  It's
devolved a bit into this as I guess I was too subtle when I wrote in
the project introduction:

"We aren't looking to involve the wider community at a day to day
level in this process, or looking to collate a wish list of features:
the plan is to keep focused on scoping out the technology and
techniques."

Why is this important?  When working on big ideas you need to take a
step back, to be creative you need to be able to dart from topic to
topic at your own pace, to look at minute detail then back up to high
level as inspiration strikes.   This creative process is greatly
hampered by getting bogged down with wading through stiff that is
irrelevant or already decided, or too soon in the cycle to be able to
discuss.

I know this is hugely important as all the biggest advances that I've
made over the years in with the OpenSceneGraph have been done working
alone, just banging my head against the wall till something compelling
pops out,    The State system, multi-pass, multi-stage rendering,
database paging, osgViewer, the plugin system, #pragma(tic) shader
composition have all been instigated by myself reflection on big
issues and coming up with solutions.  Those solutions later get
refined with help from the community.

For each of these steps forward the community has a great deal of
input to helping me understand what the problems that users had and
needed to be solved, sometimes there was a specific issue or issues
realised by the community that had no good solution and I went away
and came back with a solution.  Sometimes, it was years of the
community and myself struggling with an issue with no clear resolution
that was found, then suddenly a solution came to me - #pragma(tic)
shader composition is one example of the later.

For the VulkanSceneGraph project, the input I have needed to
understand what is required has been accumulated over 20 years of
working the OpenSceneGraph.  I've been witness to all of the issues
that the user community have had trying to solve their graphics
application tasks, I've been involved in tens of thousands of support
discussion, made many thousand bug fixes, many thousand reviews of
code submissions.   I really know what it's like for the community, I
know what it's like to maintain a piece of software over many years.
I need no more input at his point, I've listed to you all for nearly
two decades, all this input data is sat inside my head and has been
gestating for years.

Right now attempts at technical discussions or putting in your ideas
is not at all helpful, in fact it's a real hindrance to creativity,
it's a distraction from necessary quiet time required to come up with
coherent designs.

So the please be patient, there will be a time for technical
discussions, testing, refining, it's just not now.

Robert.