Was recently reading a post describing some other software and came across this as a feature in it's feature list and thought FF could benefit from the same. It's got a renderer abstraction layer allowing it to export to your favorite renderer. That would be tremendously helpful for me if you (The FF team) could pull that off. I keep running into walls with your software despite my overpowered hardware and really could use GPU rendering capabilities. I know you like to claim 64bit and GPU wouldn't benefit FF, but that's simply and provably not true. If you were also unwilling to remove/modify your custom memory throttle then I suppose it would be true but that wouldn't make sense as it was only there because of a lack of 64bit capabilities in the first place.
Failing that, would it not be possible to just make a separate renderer for FF that's GPU specific or 64bit specific and have some way for us to send batch jobs to either that or the current command renderer? Hell, why not just give all 3 as options and let us decide what we want to make use of based on our needs?
Also, is it just me or does anyone else think this would be the perfect opportunity for FF to have a Kickstarter. Basically, just make a Kickstarter asking for cash so you can make it 64bit and GPU compatible so we can render epic images finally, and not need epic time frames to do it. Not sure what the rewards could be, free license for a year or something maybe? I've seen more than a few established companies do this to raise funds for further development and succeed quite nicely. Though I will admit, given your history with this subject and adamant claims that it's impractical or not useful to do, I'd be skeptical that you'd actually use the funds to do it. It has been 9 years since 64bit compatibility was first requested and zero progress has been attempted, much less made, as far as I can tell. By any normal standards that's fairly absurd.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day. Stay tuned for more tomorrow, maybe
Seriously though, it would be nice to at least consider these things as possibilities, instead of dismissing them as nonsense and pushing forward cramming new features on top of everything. Claiming 64bit compat. and especially GPU compat. would be huge new features to add to the list FF already has. It would easily give you a leg up and I imagine, despite what others may say, it would allow you to increase the selling price as well. I could see Pro. going for $500 no problem with those added to it's feature list.
