Bug report Bryce/Lion

green_knight

Since people keep throwing around 'Apple changed everything and now Bryce needs to be rewritten from scratch' here is why I don't believe that:

I've just run Bryce 7 on my Macbook Pro, OSX 10.7.3. It's an unsatisfactory experience, because it keeps crashing, but here is what I was able to do:

- start up the application with a new document
- add Bryce native elements
- render a scene
- manipulate items in the scene, views, animation -
- change sky and fog settings
(basically, the create, edit, sky and fog, menus work, as do all the items that determine how you see things.
- open an older Bryce scene (this goes straight to a Mac dialog)
- add an image to the 2D picture object gallery, and click OK to have it appear in the scene
- create a tree with default settings
- go to the materials lab, choose a material, render a preview of it
- import objects

Based on this, I would say that Bryce 'works' in that all the things that make Bryce Bryce - creating 3D models, applying textures and rendering them - works.

What doesn't work is Bryce-specific dialogues.
I was not able to
- register Bryce (ok, I cheated - this is my version of Bryce 7 that I initialised under Snow Leopard and copied across to the new machine)
- accept or decline any dialogue other than, for some reason, the dialogue where you can specify a 2D image. That one works, which tells me that it's possible TO make Bryce dialogues work with Lion.

I've tested just about any feature I could think off up to the point where it hits a dialogue, and they all work up to that point. I have not experienced any _other_ crashes - every crash is entirely repeatable and predictable: hit a Bryce dialogue and watch it die. Whether you abort or click ok.

Sounds like an early hack coming back to bite. This also sounds as if a reasonably skilled programmer should be able to fix this in a reasonable amount of time. As bugs go, this one is friendly - it's repeatable, predictable and involves a very small part of the code. It also happens to make the application unusable, but that's just because dialogues are such a vital part of using the application.

Are there other problems with Bryce 7 and Lion?
Maybe. But somehow, I don't think they will be any worse than the bugs that you find in every application ever. (The colour chooser in the sky settings is a bit eratic and doesn't give you quite the colour underneath the tip of the cursor, for instance). But those are minor niggles - only you cannot find and eliminate them until you can actually use the dialogues.

But given this experience - that all the important parts of Bryce will run very happily under Lion with the exception of one, vital feature - I am more than ever annoyed that we're still at the point of 'it will get fixed eventually'. If I'm wrong - if there are other issues with Bryce 7/Lion that I cannot see - then I'd appreciate being told, because right now it looks like a minor bug that very much should be fixable in under a year.

Chohole

I was not able to
- register Bryce (ok, I cheated - this is my version of Bryce 7 that I initialised under Snow Leopard and copied across to the new machine)

Some have also been able to get Bryce to work on Macs which had been upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard,rahter than on a new machine pre-installed with Lion.

green_knight

On my dualboot machine, the same thing happened as with this one - it works fine until it hits a dialogue. When the first dialogue is 'enter your registration number' you never get far; when you use a preregistered copy, you can do all kinds of stuff - just not, you know, save or anything important.

I could live with this more easily if the whole application was throwing its toys out of the pram like Bryce 6, and complaining about libraries and behaving in weird and wonderful manners... but it _nearly_ works. So close and yet so far...