What you need to know about JASS-2
JASS has been created with the non formal agreement from Domino Marama from Dominodesigns and Ton Roosendaal from the blender organisation. Both individuals have encouraged us via IM, IRC and email comunication to publish JASS. The “selling” of JASS-pro does not contradict any license policies. Please read the official page about the GPL philosophy for more information. And see below what that implies to JASS.
WHAT DO YOU PAY FOR (and what you will get):
* We distribute JASS-2 PRO mainly for getting the budget to continue our work on the Machinimatrix video tutorials. But actually we do not sell the software. We sell the support.
This covers (currently without any defined limitations in time and frequency):
- take care about bugs and bugfixes in Jass and Primstar
- help with the installation process of Jass and Primstar
- offer online support as time is available for blender questions
- Inspection of your .blend file or your sculpted prim as time is available.
* On paying the distribution fee for JASS-2 you receive your personal download link. This link will always point to the newest release and update versions of JASS-2. Currently all updates on JASS-2 are free. As long as JASS-2 is distributed on the internet this link will be available for you as a purchaser.
* If you have lost your download link, you can recover it from the recovery vendor. That costs you 1 L$. You can decide to avoid this fee by simply bookmarking your download link in your browser right after you payed the distribution fee.
REDISTRIBUTION:
* You are absolutely free to redistribute your copy of Jass-2 either the public version as well as the pro version for free or for charge. We will not and in fact we can not keep you from doing this due to the GPL license policies!
* The one and only reason why we have created the JASS-fork from primstar is that the original developer currently is not available and we do not know when he will return. We will gladly forward all our investigations, bugfixes, and many of our new development to the primstar development as soon as it becomes possible and wanted.
* If you plan to do a fork of either Domino’s original Primstar or our modified Jass version then please feel free to do so. But if you think that you have a bugfix or a new feature you want to distribute then you also should consider to just feedback your fixes to Dominodesigns and/or us so we can integrate your work into ours. At the end that might help more than putting out new forks and potentially confuse the users.
ADDRESSED TARGET SYSTEMS:
* Any operating system that supports Blender (manual installation of the scripts)
* Installer for Windows (fully automated installation)
* Repacked blender distribution for MAC (to be installed like blender)
Please note that JASS-2 is fully based on primstar. We have added some fixes and new development to the scripts. All our development is described in the Jass-2 PRO page. So basically you just need to take the scripts folders named “jass” and “primstar” and place these folders at the accurate location in the blender scripts directory. There is no actual need for an installer.
Therefore we have added an archive file to the PRO version of Jass, which contains just the script folders you need on your unix/linux distribution. Be aware that each flavour of linux contains its own quirks. So if the scripts do not work as expected you need to figure out by yourself how to fix that. However if you can give us significant feedback we may well add fixes to our own code. And we encourage you to report your fixes to Dominodesigns too.
If you plan to create an installer for linux, then feel free to do that. We ourself will only add a script based installer if it proofs reasonable.
The Machinimatrixs Team
Umm.. I’m available, just not very active at the moment. I’m currently recovering from some minor back surgery which has aggravated the nerve problem in my neck and arm. I’ve also got problems with graphics drivers (thanks to ATI removing support for the chipset in my portable grrrr) which means I can’t run Blender 2.49 or Second Life very well at the moment. That led me to focus on improving my health rather than improving Primstar. Email is the best way to contact me at the moment as I can’t spend long on the computer due to pain issues, so don’t often get beyond that. I’m hopeful the surgery effect will have gone in a few weeks, and hope to gradually increase the time I spend on the computer again then.
There are some changes to Primstar in JASS that I wouldn’t accept in the official Primstar.. The subdivision hack for lemon spheres really should be using math such as discussed in http://wscg.zcu.cz/wscg2006/Papers_2006/Full/B89-full.pdf to be accurate for all shapes and options for example. I’ll no doubt add some of the other changes to the official release as soon as I can test them.
And Gaia is right in saying it’s ok to charge for JASS, she even promised me a percentage of any takings, so don’t feel you should get outraged on my behalf.
Thanks for writing up this post, I think it answered a lot of concerns people had.
In light of this, I’ve got a maintenance fork up at http://gitorious.org/sving/ which contains all the GPL’d bits in JASS-Pro. For the record, even I paid for a copy because I like your tutorials, and the work you do.
Please, keep it up.