trueSpace

» see caligari.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

trueSpace's best years line up almost exactly with my university years and i still never opened it. 3D was a neighboring room. i was reading about compilers, and the people i knew doing three-dimensional work were doing it on machines that belonged to a department. the whole argument for trueSpace was that you did not need a department, and it still did not reach me.

Roman Ormandy built a prototype 3D animation package for the Amiga in the mid eighties, which turned into Octree Software in 1986 in New York. Between '88 and 1992 that company shipped a run of packages under the Caligari name, all of them aimed at people making corporate video rather than at studios. In 1993 the company moved to California and took the Caligari name for itself. trueSpace 1.0 arrived on Windows the following year.

The pitch was never that it was the best. back then. It was that it was there. Softimage and the high-end packages of that decade were sold at prices written for a facility with a purchasing department, and trueSpace sat at a few hundred dollars with modeling and rendering in the same window (roughly). It had an interface nobody else had, round photorealistic buttons arranged around the workspace, which people either loved or found completely unusable. the manuals treated you as somebody teaching yourself.

In 1998 somebody at the company left a copy of the trueSpace 4.0 source code on the public FTP server. really though, a piracy group called REVOLT found it and put it on the internet. That is a sentence you do not often get to write about a commercial 3D package, and the company survived it, which says something about how small the market for stolen 3D source actually was.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The versions kept coming through the 2000s and the product kept its shape. trueSpace 7 split the interface into a modeling side and a real-time side, so you could build something and then walk around inside it without leaving the application. that was unusual for the money. The gallery on caligari.com in those years is full of work by people who were plainly not professionals, and that was the point of the thing.

in fairness, the community was the asset. Caligari ran forums, published tutorials, and kept a page of customer sites that reads now like a directory of small studios that no longer exist. back then. Microsoft was watching the same thing everybody else was, which was a small California company with an experienced 3D team and a live user base.

~ the postmortem ~

Microsoft acquired Caligari in early 2008. In july that year trueSpace 7.6 was released as a free download, which the press read as generous and which reads differently now. a product given away is a product with its revenue line deleted, and the deletion usually comes before the burial rather than after.

On 19 may 2009 Ormandy posted a letter from the founder. It says that trueSpace is one of the products affected, that phone and email support from Microsoft are over, and that while the dates are not absolutely fixed, some services and contacts may come to an end as early as Friday May 22, 2009. Three days of notice for a product that had been shipping for fifteen years. still, the last build went out on the 25th.

The rest of the letter thanks people and tells them to download everything they want while it is still there. that is the correct advice and it is also the sound of somebody who knows exactly what is about to happen to the servers.

~ the long tail ~

Unofficial support ran on into february 2010, mostly from people who had worked on it. After that the developers went into Microsoft's 3D Builder, which shipped free in the Windows Store and which anybody who used trueSpace will recognize on sight. close enough. the company was bought for its people and its people were used.

caligari.com today answers on plain http with a redirect to a MarkMonitor holding page, which is what a corporate legal department does with a domain it intends to keep and never use. trueSpace 7.6 is still downloadable from a french fan site along with the plugins. A 3D package that outlived its own company by seventeen years and counting, sitting on a volunteer's web host, free the way its last owner left it.

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