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Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 18:01:56 -0500
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From: pfinch@best.com (Phillip Finch)
To: Multiple recipients of list <lightwave@garcia.com>
Subject: Re: (New) windows modeller!!
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>From: jdavid@infinet.com (J. David Johnson)
>>I suggest you all go to this site and get the demo version of the windows
>AMAPI.
>>This is *NOT* to be missed. Whoever wanted alias-style fillets, well this
>>does it, and it's so powerful I want to cry for wasting my time building
>>models in LW & 3DS.
>
>Under Win95 it errs out with a "Cannot open message file".
>
>Any help here? (There seemed to be no problems with install,
>other than I didn't instsll sample files (said no to question)
I opened it okay in NT. You might try re-installing it with those sample
files. Ordinarily, you wouldn't expect a developer to set up a demo in such
a way that one of the install options will automatically crash it; but this
little sweetheart seems to be a Special Case.
It crashes all the time. I can crash it at will just running the opening
tutorial. After a while it gets to be a game: "Let's see what else I can do
to crash AMAPI--yep, that works, too!"
It looks like a program written by and for Mac enthusiasts (complete with
the requisite Kai-style eccentric interface) badly ported over to the PC as
an afterthought, because if you don't try to sell a PC version you won't
make any money. But their heart doesn't seem to have been in it.
I gather that AMAPI is a French program, and the text of the tutorials reads
as if it were written by somebody with a couple of semesters of English As A
Second Language. Really bad, laughably bad. Those of you old enough to
remember the owner's manuals that came with Japanese cars in the late 60's
and early 70's will know exactly what I'm talking about.
As far as I'm concerned, they'd have been better off releasing it in good
French rather than in such bad English. And this is just a few simple lines
of a simple tutorial. I shudder to imagine what a nightmare the actual
manuals would be.
I really wish I could make some comments about the functions of the program
itself. But I can barely run the damn thing for as much as five minutes
without having it freeze on me. The capabilities of a parametric design
program, as described by others on this list, sound very useful. I'd like to
try it out, some time, on a program that was written by people who sweated
the details. These folks didn't.
The original message about this program--from Ace Miles, I think?--was very
positive, so somebody is doing some useful work with it. But as far as I'm
concerned, the search for an alternate modeler goes on.
(Has anybody tried the Trispectives modeller, which has been getting rave
