Okay, what's this "business" about Subscription Contract?...

#17

Ah… you know, after working on the trial ‘license’ for 30 days, you just want to have that license coming in. Explain it to the client you cant deliver because you’re waiting for a license to come in. And no, due to the new licensing you’re not allowed to jump back to your old versions. Read the small print…

The whole thing is just bad. Everybody’s fears came true. We all now have the same ‘responsive’ replies from support as the other AD users. Also the AD dealers are as snappy as support on your requests for information, and I do not expect a reaction form my dealer on my questions until the promotion update sale is expired…

All forums have the same posts about licenses, support, installation issues etc. And AD is still wondering why they are seen as the big bad wolf…

The takeover didn’t score points, the whole 7.5 update with new licensing is a big fail. Version 8 has to be a very sweet update to get some of the love back…

#18

I can’t complain too much about the support so far - I’m just scared to send in another issue because they’ll simply change my login password and mark the issue closed… :banghead:

I haven’t even bothered since that last attempt - I guess I should “get it working” so I can at least close out the issue for myself.

After CORE materializes, I may be dropping a couple of these apps. Lightwave was my first love, I know it the best and Newtek is way more indie friendly with their pricing and upgrade policies…

It’s not that I can’t afford these apps, I just don’t feel any pressing need to do so.

The last time I ran out waving cash in hand, exclaiming luv for a 3D app, I got slapped in the face and my purchase dumped over into the hands of this company - along with all of the great promises for a wonderful mid-year update tossed to the wind as well…

Autodesk gives me the impression of being like Jabba the Hut; they’re big, they smell bad and as long as they can snuggle you up close when they want and tap yer cas(s)h, they don’t care how you feel or think…

I don’t fault them so much with these transition issues, but calling what they did to XSI a v7.5 update is a major shame - I doubt I’ll EVER pay $800 maintenance again for a string GREP to replace a coupla strings, the removal of a bunch of non-AutoDesk related code and the inclusion of something I don’t really need at the moment.

V7 was all about ICE, v7.5 should have been all about ICE and that’s certainly what I was expecting.

-Will

#19

Hi Will,

No one is going to close your request if you email them again.

Support is doing their best to respond to technical issues right away - the legacy licensing issues are taking a bit longer to investigate, and there have been a few delays along the way.

We know it’s not perfect, but there are people working very hard to fix this, and they are doing their best to iron out the bugs in the system. These issues are all being tracked, because it’s certainly something that we don’t want to see happen again.

As for the features in 7.5, the product and feature lockdown was done before the acquisition, as I remember those the roadmaps from last summer. Again, that’s not the perfect answer for you, but it’s likely that Softimage|XSI 7.5 would have looked a lot like Autodesk Softimage 7.5.

I think it would help if we had better transparency on how features make it into a release… i need to do some more research on that and get back to you guys.

The team that migrated over from Softimage - myself included - have learned a lot from this experience, and I feel the hardest part is behind us. I am not trying to make excuses to you guys, but i do want you to know that we are listening and we want to fix this. No one likes to read about your customers having problems.

If anyone has any issues, please send to softimageinquiries@autodesk.com so we can track them properly and do our best to improve things in the future.

Thanks again for your patience.

jen

#20

Hi Jen, I just want you to know that in no way should you take any of my comments personally.

I’ve appreciated your help from your very first post here in my thread - frankly it’s nice to see you around being from Autodesk and all.

I’m a software engineer who works for a very large and well known company also and I certainly don’t take offense when I read things - actually I have a few critisms myself!
So hopefully these posts, usually spawned from our frustrations don’t catch you personally…

As I’ve said, I can appreciate the transition of the code base and more importantly of any employees that made it over, but bottom line, we’re talking time which equals money here.

Come 08/11/2009 Autodesk is gonna be expecting me to fork over another maintenance fee and frankly I feel this should be extended by at least the amount of time it took me to receive my updated serials and other codes which was as I posted above.

Today I actually received the v7.5 disk in the mail (a nice surprise).

Being in the middle of a home remodel, I don’t have the time I’d normally have to futz around with getting software to work but I’ll try if not tonite, definitely by the weekend to get this package properly registered and working as I would like.

Thanks again for your support and being around here - it’s definitely appreciated! :wavey:

-Will

#21

Hi Jennifer i had send a email to you today because y had never recieve a email from Autodesk to confirme my account migration and i never recieve a new log in to Autodesk account or cd key or cd y d’ont know what is appen with my one year maintenance maybe you lost my account iam not sure?

#22

All talks set aside, it would have been better to just go the update route and implement a completely new licensing with v8.
7.5 still could have had all the cosmetic updates wit the AD branding. Now we’re just guinea pigs for AD, who tried to implement this licensing thing during the beta with Maya 2009 and pulled it at the last moment due to all the users complaining about it.

In combination with a license transfer from company A to B it just means disaster.
Even legally there should have been more elegant ways to deal with this subject.

I know the 7.5 update was already started before AD stepped in, and feature wise there wouldn’t be any difference, but with all the things happening around it people feel a bit left out to say it mildly.

I also know the group of people working at Softimage were always very nice and great with support, but I still fear the ‘AD effect’ now you’re assimilated into the hive.

rob

#23

Wow; I had heard horror stories about this on the Newtek Forums, but I had no idea it was this bad. I’m still almost a year away from buying an additional program (own LW 9.6); but from what I’ve seen, I may just keep an eye on CORE and stay away from AD for now…even if it is considered the standard for game dev. It’s not worth the headache.

-Keith

#24

Very wise idea cause as of Sunday nite, I’m still not registered - I plugged in (again) the serial # and product codes provided (they’re even the same numbers on the Disk I received from Autodesk in the mail and the system told me invalid product code.

At this point I’ma hafta again contact AD to get some help getting this going. I’m not sure about “Server Name” and all the other parameters that the form was asking for when I tried to get past this error.

Is there a page somewhere that explains in detail HOW to setup this license server???
(…and they really expect me to stop using v7 with the dongle??? :rolleyes: )

-Will

#25

Sorry to hear about your situation WillBellJr. You certainly aren’t the only one. There is a looong thread over on XSIBase with many people having similar complaints.

The way AutoDesk has forced this license change through and handled the resulting situation is shocking! Not to mention the slap in the face that is the now mandatory maintenance fee.
I had misgivings back in 2008 when the AutoDesk takeover of XSI was first announced. This ridiculous situation proved my fears were justified.
The upgrade costs+maintenance fees AutoDesk want to syphon out of me for this pathetic update will instead be going to another company. You may have heard of them… a customer friendly company called Side Effects.

#26

Did you try activating the license at autodesk.com/register?
Sometimes the NLA tool will give an error, but autodesk.com/register works.

If you get an error, what error do you get?

Server Name is the name of your computer (run hostname in a command prompt).
Server ID (or host ID) is the Physical address of your Ethernet adapter (run ipconfig /all to get the ID).

#27

Hi, no I didn’t try that cause I’m not at all familiar with this new licensing scheme.

With the previous (dongle) I knew little tricks like plug in the dongle and wait say 10-secs or so BEFORE running the licensing manager and other tricks (hard learned) when it would fail (common problem with this package after I upgraded from v5 Foundation…)

I haven’t paid my dues yet with this one obviously…

I’ll try your suggested trick and see how it goes the next chance I get.

-Will

#28

I checked out the thread over at XSIBase about this; and I can safely say I will definitely be staying away from anything to do with Autodesk for now. Lost another potential client to bad publicity that is itself being handled badly.

There are a few people at the NT Forums that don’t appreciate the new little messege on starting up XSI: “Softimage XSI is dead long live…”. It’s being taken as a slap in the face by some, and is in poor taste in my opinion.

-Keith

#29

From: Softimage Licensing
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009, Sorry for the late reply. With the 7.5 release, we’re quite busy and a little back-logged.

You’re absolutely right, you should have been upgraded to 7.5. I will follow up internally to have your contract migrated into the Autodesk database. Given the volume of migration activity we have going on these days, it might take up to a week for you to receive your “welcome to 7.5” kit email and physical package, so please be patient. It’s on its way though, so there’s good news there

If you have any further questions, please let me know.

Thanks,
Christine
Today March 27 ,2009, i d’ont recive any welcome email or dvd and y try to be patient but the Softimage 7.5 mod tool is out and y cant enter a key on the software y pay for,normaly a good corp serve the peoples who pay for a service before making the distibution of a free software…also next time Autodesk, when you cut job keep more peoples maybe you save on salary but with more staf you give a better service and you d’ont loose your customers.

#30

From my experience, just log back into your account - you may be able to NOW receive your codes - I was waiting as well when I got an email stating that someone had changed my login to fix my problems.

I went back in to fix my login back the way I had it previously and noticed that I was able to finally setup as the contract manager and receive my codes - NEVER received a Welcome anything…

-Will

#31

No,i c’ant log in ,i had sent a new email to Jennifer tody to know what is appening to my subscribtion.

#32

Just to keep this in perspective, some people have had no problems installing the program. The only thing you are hearing about here are the people who are having problems, there are many, many more who are not having problems.

Of course, if you want to wait for a product due out some time in the next year or two… or maybe later, who’s biggest improvements seem to be catching up with where everyone else was 5 years ago, be my guest. Hopefully by then they will have fixed some of the bugs that have been around since 6.5.

#33

Guys, keep app wars out of this please.
This thread, however pessimistic and doomy&gloomy, is meant to deal with the licensing problem of the new licensing system (SW and management both) and, out of their kindness, for AD employees to understand and help.

Saying “wow this sounds bad, I will keep an eye on some alpha software”, or replying in tone to that kind of pointless comments doesn’t help it one bit.

Next branch of the thread going that way is going to simply be deleted. If the person who had the most issues with this (Will) managed to stay civil and responsive all the way through, I’m sure it’s possible to do just as much for satisfied and prospective customers :slight_smile:

#34

Sorry ThE_JacO if you d’ont like my post but when you spend 0ver 4000$ for a software you want to recive the update ,i d’ont have a password to log in ,i d’ont have the key to instal the software,and i d’ont recive any welcome email or cd rom from Autodesk after month,but y try to stay civil .

#35

I’m sure it’s possible to do just as much for satisfied and prospective customers

That’s fair enough; though I would like to respond one last time that bugs in the afore-mentioned program have been largely taken care of in the latest releases.

Back on topic. When I see things like this, I try to take what’s happening with a grain of salt. Granted; AD should/could have waited to try this new licensing scheme, till the kinks were worked out and they had the capacity to handle what appears to be numerous problems with the system. I’m not saying any software developer (large or small) is perfect, and I don’t expect them to be. However; for someone on the fence like me, conversations such as this make me wary about making a purchase. It’s not really the issues themselves for me…it’s how they are handled.

I’ve downloaded the XSI Mod Tool (only version 6 is currently available) twice and tried running it on my Dell XPS 400; it runs once, then when I try to start it up again…nothing (I run Lightwave 9.6 just fine, as well as the demo of Max and Maya PLE). I can try to download the latest demo to see if it screws up the same way…but why does AD need my work phone number (required field)? Are they really planning on calling a prison (I’m a Corrections Officer at a local Prison)? I can pretty much guaruntee that they’ll get a somewhat “unenthused” Officer on the other end of the line. It takes a bit of fishing around on the main AD site to find the Softimage page, as it isn’t in their product menu at all…

Anyways; I hope the original poster’s problem is taken care of, and he gets something for his time and frustration…he should, for all the money he’s spent so far.

-Keith

#36

If you’re a customer that’s had a problem and want it solved this thread is where you should post, and some indignation is perfectly fine.
I was referring to other posts from people who’ve had no involvment, nor plan to have any, posting potentially inflamatory comments, but that seems to be taken care of too now.