Announcing Community Wishlist!

You know all of those wish lists scattered everywhere on the web? Well, we hope we’ve found a better solution. We’ve been testing this idea for the last six months and we think we’re ready to take it public. You’ll see that the new forums/wish lists are already populated with ideas submitted by a bunch of users.

How this works:

• Each user has 20 votes for each forum
• Each idea can have no more than 3 votes by a single user
• If you enter an idea, it will cost you 1 vote – therefore try to make sure the idea doesn’t already exist
• When an idea is implemented, votes are returned to all the users that voted
• User can change their votes at any time
• Admins can move, edit and delete ideas as they see fit to better meet the goals of the forum
• The more precise and detailed a description you give, the more likely your idea will rise higher in the list

I posted an idea, what next?

We will flag ideas that are getting our attention as “under review”. Because of limits on what we can say publicly, that is as far as we can go with commenting on a particular idea. If it is “under review” it simply means we’re studying it for possible implementation or gathering data, but there is no commitment to do it.

Remember, we do not release versions on “internet time”. Unlike the web sites this was designed for, our process of releasing functionality is much longer term. So there won’t be a constant churn of ideas being “closed out” by us and votes returned to you. For this tool to map to our process, we will be looking at the data during a short period of the year (3-6 months) and deciding what actions to take after that. Don’t expect to post an idea and a month later for us to respond in some fashion to it. The most likely scenario is that you’ll post an idea and if a lot of other people vote on it, we’ll eventually flag it as “under review” – but that could be 9 months later or longer.

Please treat this as an experiment in working with the community. Even if this tool is not the final home for your wish list, we'll do our best to export all the ideas to whatever future system might take its place. Your voice will persist.

Note: It’s important to realize that these lists are simply raising the quality of the feedback we get from the community. They are not a replacement for how we define the features for any given release. They are valuable input, but beta input, product strategy, focus, innovation and other factors are also important aspects we consider.

Administration

We’re very fortunate to have Eric Craft, Martin Breidt and Dave Baker agree to help administer the forums. They are very active in the community and we know that they can help ensure the site is as effective as it can be. Please respect their decisions. They are also able to bulk upload ideas into the forums if you beg them sufficiently, but there are reasons why bulk upload of ideas can be a bad idea (duplicates).

Available forums

Default Settings
Please tell us which user defaults settings you change the most! Enter a description of the default or ini setting and then see how the community votes on it. Remember these are only the user preferences you can either set in the interface or ini files.

General Feature Requests
Please help us collect ideas for new features and general product enhancements. What's on your top ten list? Add a vote to any idea you also think is important!

Small Annoying Things
This forum is about all the little annoying quirks and problems in 3ds Max that you might have gotten used to over the years but that really should be fixed.
Remember, keep these ideas to tweaks of the workflow rather than large, sweeping changes to the tools. Try to imagine how much effort a programmer has to go into in order to implement your suggestion. Anything requiring major UI changes or new UI dialogs will need to go in another forum.

SDK/Scripting Enhancements
This forum is about improvements to the SDK or Script-related.