It’s the end of another year--boy, that went fast! Hopefully you received everything that you wanted this holiday season, including LightWave 4.0!

A whole year has gone by since the "initial" LightWave 4.0 ship date and, as of this writing, it still hasn’t finally shipped in all versions. Perhaps NewTek has been a bit optimistic (to be polite) in their announcement of ship dates, but you know what? By the time you get the final shipping 4.0 in your hands, I think it will have been worth the wait. In the porting of LightWave to other platforms, much was learned, a lot of nasty bugs were discovered and fixed, and the final product is going to be that much better because of it.

There have been problems with HIIP and problems with plug-ins and problems with memory leaks (thank you, Microsoft), but all of those things are taken care of and NewTek will be providing a patch that will work with any prerelease or "final" version to the final, final version of LightWave. This patch will be provided on-line so you’ll be able to update your version of LightWave without a hassle.

What will be taken care of in the patch? Functional HIIP; a workaround for the Microsoft bug that doesn’t free memory (ever run out of virtual memory when rendering or using an image sequence?); more robust plug-in architecture; and, as a special bonus, Allen Hastings has greatly decreased rendering time under Windows 95 and Windows NT! Don’t bother calling NewTek to find out when the patch will be ready--they will be posting information as soon as it’s done.

I have a feeling that, since LightWave has been successfully ported over and there are two additional full-time programmers on the LightWave team (Arnie Cachelin and Fori Owurowa), we’re going to see some major new changes in the next version of LightWave. NewTek is being very tight-lipped about the feature list and shipping date (I think they’ve learned their lesson), but I wouldn’t be surprised to see something before you expect it (just as long as you don’t expect it now!).

Speaking of Windows 95, I had the opportunity to perform the LIGHTWAVEPRO benchmarks under this platform. Here’s the results for a 100 MHz Pentium with 32 MB RAM and a comparison to the same machine running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows NT:

Scene           Time (Win 95)	   Time (WFW 3.11)	Time (Win NT)
DOF.lws         9m 35s (575s)	   10m 47s (647s)	9m 17s (557s)
Raytrace.lws	1h16m 15s (4575s)  2h 3m 53s (7433s)	1h 14m 18s (4458s)
Textures.lws	3m 44s (224s)      3m 57s (237s)	2m 43s (163s)
ZBufSort.lws	9m 37s (577s)      9m 6s (546s)	        6m 32s (392s)

So what does this tell us? Some scenes are much faster under NT (Textures and ZBufSort), but the others are pretty close. With the final patched version, we should see times that are faster straight across the board, bringing them much closer to each other. That’s good news for Windows 95 users, but I still highly recommend getting Windows NT if you use LightWave professionally. The multitasking and memory handling is much better under NT, and if you do crash, you won’t take your whole system down!

I predict that 1996 is going to be the year of the plug-in. I feel that we’re going to see an explosion in the number of commercial plug-ins available for Layout and Modeler. The few that I’ve seen so far have been pretty impressive and I know there’re many more cool plug-ins in the works.

What’s in store for LIGHTWAVEPRO this coming year? Hopefully, you’ll be seeing many new changes. We plan on having new features and departments in LIGHTWAVEPRO, maintaining the quality you’ve come to expect.

John Gross
Editor