PROGRESS REPORT

When building big(-ish) software product from scratch the significant problem is that for a long time you do not have program functioning as a whole. You have bits and pieces that can be looked at and tested separately and most of it is on the lower level. It takes quite a while before you can implement features that will be visible to users. As a result of this it’s hard to see what you are actually building until you get to the stage where most of the legwork is done and you can work on features themselves. You have to keep your vision ahead and trust that you’ve got enough knowledge and experience that you’ll eventually arrive close enough to where you actually wanted to be with the project ;).

ACS is really about workflow and especially a workflow that has to involve many individual features working seamlessly to provide smooth and efficient user experience. It’s not really possible (or at least I can’t do that) to design such workflows fully in advance. You can design individual features or components quite closely but the higher level overview is something different. You need feedback from using the software itself. You need to prototype a lot, see what may work and what may not and go from there. You need iterations - never ever present users with the first design and implementation you came up with - unless it’s something very simple.

Up until about two months ago large part of my work on ACS3 was legwork and it started getting REALLY tedious. But it had to be done. For the past two months I was finally able to spend more time on workflow and features development and I start seeing what I’ve been building almost every day for more then a year now. I have just released 4th alpha build to ACS3 testers and I’d like to think that I’m quite close to reaching feature complete status for the Early Access release. Getting to this point will allow me to focus more on revising and streamlining the toolset and interface. I will be able to start working on proper rigging assets as well. ACS3 will still be far from being complete but it should at least become usable. As you can imagine, I can’t wait to get to this stage. Usually this is the moment when things start coming together (or not).

I’m also very happy to see that a few testers were already able to use ACS3 for their work and produce some content. For me this is incredibly important and it boosts my confidence in the project. The animation below was done by Francois Daigle. Francois didn’t use the prototype quadruped rig included with ACS3 alpha but rather built his own version using slightly different set of modules. This is exactly how I envision ACS3 to be used!