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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Lofstead" data-source="post: 405701" data-attributes="member: 7199">Victor,When the announcement came out about Hasbro selling the online gaming rights, there was a flurry of information posted at various places (Wizards' boards and maybe even ENWorld news was where I gathered the bits and pieces--it would be hard to dig up again) saying that doing that kind of work was outside of the arrangement between Wizards and Fluid.  Thus, Fluid had to scrap that work because they didn't have license to do it.  I do seem to remember specific statements by people involved that Fluid didn't have the rights for online gaming and that Hasbro went ahead and sold the rights without seeing what Fluid was working on (it was not relevant).  If they did have license, Hasbro would have had to buy back the rights (buy themselves out of the contract).  Based on the amount of work Fluid had done and the news surrounding Hasbro selling the rights, it is extremely doubtful they paid off Fluid so that they could sell the rights again.  Given how proud Fluid is of that work, I don't see them being willing to terminate that portion of the contract for less than a pretty major payoff from the deep pockets of big corporate America (I wouldn't be).  Also note from Scott at Fluid's recent interview that they didn't formalize the contract for the demo from the PHB until after the product was delivered.  He suggested (but didn't explicitly state) that was when they also contracted for the MasterTools product (he suggested that it was one contract that really covered both items--kind of a two step delivery).The other pieces of information that support the idea is the repeated statements by parties at Wizards, Fluid, and in the community that are close to the project that there was never any consistent direction.  It was more a matter of they contracted for some vague notion of software that changed with each new party that was involved in the project (this has been published in probably every interview with someone discussing why things went the way they did).  If there were ever any specific contracted deliverables, we would have had a product sooner since they would not have been able to go down any "wrong" paths based on whims of people at Wizards (or Fluid, for that matter).  It would have been clear to everyone what the goals were, what features it needed to have, and what the deliverable dates needed to be.From what I saw on that model site, it is a scanning company.  They take laser scans of physical objects and develop wireframe data points for use in graphics applications.  The actual painting of the models (much like your average first-person shooter game) would need artists to do the work (build the "skins").  The actual dropping the rendered models into the software would be purely a programmer's job.  Much as Davin described, artists and programmers rarely cross over.  When they do, the product tends to be really, really bad (not always, but frequently).The art/programming budget question comes back to the indecision about what they were delivering.  If they are devleoping an online gaming environment, art is VERY important.  If it is a character maintenance tool, art is important for asthetics, but without the art, the program would still be fully functional.Please excuse me if I came off harshly.  I am of the crowd that has a really good idea what it would take to build the basics of what we all need and am frustrated by the delays and eventual delivery of something that doesn't even meet the minimums.  Like most in this camp, I don't have the time to do it myself and didn't get started 2 years ago due to the promises of e-tools (then MasterTools).  There are a lot of excuses for what happened with the software.  From a customer perspective, I don't believe any of them are valid (granted we didn't fund the development directly so we have no real recourse other than to not buy the product).  Now with the continued silence at Fluid (although there is the rumor of a patch this month being spread by Wizards tech support), we can only hope that something more than "throwing it over the wall" happened with the product.Jay</blockquote>

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