The Simplify3d Tips and Information Thread

[jimc]

the one thing about s3d is they believe the best place to hide something is right in front of you. you can look at the same settings page for a month and never notice that option that is right there. it can be tough moving from one piece of software to another. you have to learn everything about it and how everything interacts and works. it might be rough in the beginning but in the long run you are much better off. i consider myself lucky to never start off with another one of the open source slicers. all i have really known is s3d and after a year and a half i am to the point where i feel i know it well enough and how my printer works with it where i can very easily change settings and can tell exactly what will happen.

[Geoff]

the one thing about s3d is they believe the best place to hide something is right in front of you. you can look at the same settings page for a month and never notice that option that is right there. it can be tough moving from one piece of software to another. you have to learn everything about it and how everything interacts and works. it might be rough in the beginning but in the long run you are much better off. i consider myself lucky to never start off with another one of the open source slicers. all i have really known is s3d and after a year and a half i am to the point where i feel i know it well enough and how my printer works with it where i can very easily change settings and can tell exactly what will happen.

It's for exactly that reason I have not purchased a legitimate copy of S3D lol I started with open source slicers and all of the features you guys rave about with S3D are and have been done by many programs, but no one attempted to put them all into one (im sure we've used most of them...) Let me liken it to a DVD/Home theatre combo. You get the Amp, speakers and DVD player in the kit - but if your DVD player dies, guess what? there is no buying or fixing that main head unit (or not as considerable service cost..) so then you are waiting on them to fix one part of your system which leaves the rest redundant (unless you go to extraordinary lengths....)

So, I prefer to sell Amplifiers and DVD's seperate to customers to avoid that problem. So, like S3D, which is running several components .. because they are trying to do it all - once one thing screws up and they focus on that, often other things are affected as a simple result of them being neglected and in the case of programming, those neglects can lead on to catastrophic failures later on. Now, the developers might be genius's that never screw up ever, but I am yet to see that from a programmer in any field, bugs are bugs for a reason.

I think The reason I prefer open source is because you don't need to rely on the company to fix the problems or make improvements - as there is always a better programmer out there that has a better way of doing it - that is a fact of life. Now, this isn't always the case, replicatorG for example... no one's touched that code for ages.. and I would almost put money on the fact that S3D is built from a very large base of open source printing code.