We've been a week here and have spent long sessions with 8 customers. We met with 4 game companies (Ntreev, Softmax, Nexon, KRGsoft), 2 VFX (SamG, Digi-Art) and 2 Design/Vis (Nod Design, LG Electronics). Kind of crazy schedule but we've been researching why Korea is growing like 50% a year for 3ds Max. 3ds Max is used in about 95% of the game companies here as we really "own" Korea. Korea has seen an explosion in online games, casual and mobile. Console and PCs haven't been as strong due to piracy issues. We have most of the VFX business too, though Maya is here and there.
We've been researching our technology roadmap with Korean customers to make sure we're aligned to their needs and to support where they want to grow. The good news is that seem to want the same things as the North American Game companies we talked to at GDC. That keeps it a lot easier for us. There are enough differences in workflows to tangle us up as it is.
Spending a few hours each with these customers helps us to really get into their issues and to test our assumptions about what they need. One of the ideas we came up with was to research the possibility of allowing you to write out files from a new version that would load into a prior version. This would work for most things, but not for third-party data. The question is whether this is useful for anyone? We think we can load most data from a newer version if we design the new version to support that. However, nothing we can do about all that third-party data from plug-ins. It might work - it might not. It would be better than anything else we can do right now, but is it worth the effort? Any thoughts?
Anyway, need to climb into the airplane for the trip to Brisbane and more visits.
Kimchi in Korea
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Posted by ulukai on 03 Mar, 2008 at 03:37 PMFrom what Ken has posted, it seems like it’s not that much work for Autodesk that we should give up some major features. And this one would in a way change the workflows of lot of people by great amount.
Other then this, my greatest wish for a long time is to replace the old biped (no matter how you try to enhance him in every new max version) with something new and modern (again, not buying CAT seems like a big mistake 
, but there is still Puppetshop to buy :-D).
Posted by Josef Wienerroither on 03 Mar, 2008 at 03:23 PMso Eric:
you always work allone and never have to exchange data with other people as it seems ?
Posted by ecraft on 03 Mar, 2008 at 01:33 PMThe question I would want to see from people really wanting this is what are you willing to give up for it? Since I am sure this will pull efforts from other features, enhancements, etc. Personally I would rather see the effort placed else where. If I need to go back a version I can use Bobo’s BFF or FBX, DAE, etc. I would probably never use this feature in my day-to-day operations.
-Eric
Posted by penn on 03 Mar, 2008 at 12:55 PMI can’t believe that you are asking this as well. This has been asked for by the advisory boards for years. of course we would like to be able to do it.
If you can do this then I assume that you can also write all the data to an ascii format instead of a binary one. This would be the best and most useful solution all round. So far there have been many attempts to create tools that do this. Bobo did the best version with BFF and that is used by people all the time.
Please add this and you will save us all a lot of headaches.
Posted by ulukai on 01 Mar, 2008 at 10:08 AMWith all the respect, first i thought that this is probably a joke of some kind. It’s almost as if there are two most common questions about max in the forums. First one is which app is better - max or xxxxx. Second question is how to open max file from new version in older versions. I’m very surprised that it seems like this is the first time in history of max that Autodesk is asking such a question. People are doing crazy things to get their data from new versions to older -from writting scripts (hello bobo ) to not upgrading to new version of max.
So in short, yes it would be EXTREMELY usful to be able to move data between different max versions.
Posted by Josef Wienerroither on 01 Mar, 2008 at 06:28 AM----->The question is whether this is useful for anyone? We think we can load most data from a newer version if we design the new version to support that.
ha ha Ken - 
that’s a good one ...
These are great things to here that you are thinking about a robust data exchange option between versions - this has been a MAJOR obstacle in mixed work environments and projects handled offsite eg via internet only.
Additionaly It is one off the most asked questions in the forums and boards how that could be done…
Forget about 3rd party plugins at the time being - or better - define a SDK standard how vanilla data could be exported without actually knowing anything about how to interpret it (like binary streams in XML etc.). Once this standard got defined - plugin developers would be responsible to provide this cross-version compatible functionality in their plugins, and give them an additional “Yes we can” argument to promote their products.
