Hey guys,
This is getting out of hand and it seems this is coming from a bad place. I am very surprised with this hostility towards InstaLOD, as we have always been extremely supportive of the indie community.
We have removed the old thread as it contained a massive amount of outdated and misleading information.
One of these reasons is that InstaLOD for INDIE is not available for purchase for more than 6 months.
When we initially released InstaLOD as early access, it only contained the optimizer - nothing else. When we launched this version, we made a promise that the final version will be available to early access users FOR FREE. We held that promise when full support for skeletal mesh optimization was released.
We even went one step further when we upgraded everybody to InstaLOD SDK2 for free. This upgrade included full support for our remeshing technology via both HLOD and “merge actors”.
SDK2 was 2.0 of InstaLOD. With software, you typically have to pay when you upgrade from Maya 2017 to Maya 2018 - unless you have a software subscription. Aside from that, the indie license is still working with all version that is was designed for - our licensing servers do not reject the activation of the indie version at all.
InstaLOD for Unreal Engine 2018 (which was released a few weeks ago) is essentially 3.0 of InstaLOD. It is a new piece of software and an integral part of our SDK2018 technology stack.
RE making money off the indie license, we never really made any substantial money off the indie license in any way. It didn’t even cover our support costs. It was a couple of hundred licenses sold. Very high support costs and low revenue essentially forced us to stop selling the license.
As said, we are working on a new business model where we’re not aiming to bring only a small fraction of our tech to the indie community, but all of our tools and integrations.
I have also said that there will be an upgrade path for original early access customers in one way or another, but you have to give us some time to work on all of it.
I am truly disappointed by the posts in this thread, as we have always supported the indie communities.
Also, very strange to see our private email conversations being posted on the internet like that.
Thank you to the one user who pointed us to this thread.
Thanks,
Manfred