Hi Boxers, I’m Issa Johnson. I recently joined BuildBox as the Director of Product. One thing I’m obsessed about is the needs of our community, making sure we’re delivering value to you Boxers. As you all know, the 3.3.7 release we did earlier this month had several issues. First, we want to let you know that this didn’t live up to our own expectations and standards. Internally, we’re digging into our product development processes to avoid this happening in future releases. We hold high expectations for ourselves because we know how much you depend on us doing our job well when we update the software. We’re sorry if any of the defects in this release caused you issues or inconveniences. Since the release a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been working virtually around the clock to find and fix everything. So, we want to share what we’re doing and what you can expect over the coming weeks. We plan to put out incremental releases to fix bugs as fast as possible, starting with the most critical. Instead of doing one big release with all the fixes (which would make you wait too long to get fixes we have ready to go), we’re fixing and releasing critical bugs as fast as possible. We’ll keep doing that until we’re satisfied we’ve resolved anything we introduced in this version. We think that might take one to two more releases. Here’s what to expect: We plan to have a release the week of March 8. The focus of this release is reliability. The most noteworthy changes are improved memory management (with more improvements coming), fixed several crashes, and folders are now working as intended. We’ll be prepping another release following that to include anything else we may need to address. As I mentioned, we’re really evaluating our product development processes to prevent this from happening again. Bugs are normal in software, but this was well beyond the normal bug here-or-there, and we know we need to do better. Soon, we also plan to share more of our long-term roadmap. We know there are still long-standing issues that the community has been requesting we address. We’ve been working hard on that plan, and we’re getting close to being able to share more. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or feedback. As the person leading the BuildBox product team, I take your input seriously as we determine where to steer the product from here.
Does the long-term roadmap that you will announce include upcoming features or just fixing problems ?? ... And do we expect to announce it within two months
I’ll just been happy if you did a more robust regression testing. Every time a new release is out, it fixes one bug but creates a new one. If it’s a case of needing more testers, let me know. I did internal testing for bespoke carrier grade telecoms software. The telecoms industry is cut throat, one bad release and the next day you’re getting sued.
The roadmap will be focused on upcoming features and we're targeting to announce it within that timeframe.
Yes, this is one of the areas we're looking to improve as we dig into our product development process. Our regression testing is massive, there's thousands of test cases, and we continue to find new ways our community is using BuildBox so part of what we're looking into is how we can engage Boxers to provide feedback on pre-release builds.
I was wondering if you had any updates on the collision shape editor. From what I've read on previous posts (about a year ago) it has been said over that it will be added soon. Every post since then has had the same response. Do you have at the very least a rough estimate of when this will be added? It's super frustrating having to try and get a triangle or rectangle to cover an asset that is far more complex.
First I would like to say that for years we feel that we are actually testing every build instead of using it (since is a payed product) Secondly, I'm happy to hear that you are rethinking your strategies in terms of testing, for Regression tests there are some rules that can be applied to reduce the number of tests in time if everything worked well. What I think you need is a automation team to automate most of the tests or at least some happy flows and edge cases so that you can check and get a generic idea if is good to be released or not. Also the road map can use features/epics instead of user stories (guessing here)
looking forward to it and hoping to see some long waited and much needed improvements in the monetization and performance departements
Both of these items are on the roadmap and pipeline. We'll have more definition on the roadmap soon, but I can confirm neither Particles or Easy Collision Shape/Mesh maker are forgotten
