A few weeks ago I promised a version of ShapeShop that would run on AMD processors. I haven’t forgotten. But I have discovered something….distressing. I seem to have…misplaced…the source code for ShapeShop v002.

I really thought I had a backup “checkpoint” (aka zip file) of the v002 source, but it turns out that the closest checkpoint I have is the code I used for my SIGGRAPH 06 paper. The release version wasn’t done for a few more months. Now, I’m not completely clueless - I do use source control, so in theory I should be able to pull the exact release codebase from CVS.  Except that I switched from CVS to SVN last summer when I changed universities, at which point I deleted the CVS repository. I do have a backup of the CVS repository, so I might be able to get the code, but it’s not going to be as easy as just re-compiling.

I could do an AMD release of the older code - it has all the interface features that people seem to actually use. It looks like the main thing missing is the XML save-file format. I initially had a binary format, but I realized that was going to be a nightmare for maintaining backwards-compatibility*. This binary format does load in v002, but it probably won’t in v003. Which I can imagine will be pretty frustrating for any users who download it…

Any suggestions?

* You would not believe how much extra work is necessary to release research software, if you want to make it actually usable. This is why you hardly ever see those cool SIGGRAPH demos released into the wild…

So, I haven’t upgraded to Windows Vista yet, but it seems that the ShapeShop installer doesn’t work on Vista. Also, ShapeShop has never worked on AMD processors. Well, good news - about a month ago a friend of mine “donated” an Athlon machine to me, so I now have a build of ShapeShop v002 with 3DNow! support. Meaning it will run on an Athlon. I am going to put that up next week after SIGGRAPH. I’m also going to try to find a way to get a Vista version going - it may end up just being a .zip file, but it should work until v003 comes out.

(Actually, if you have a friend or access to a non-Vista machine, you could try just copying the C:\Program Files\UnknownWare\ShapeShop 002\ folder to your Vista machine. If you do that, and it works, please let me know!)