Farmer Bob's got a point. As Andy's ideas have developed, G-Force has moved from the realm of visual accompanist to principal performer. The more well-defined G-Force's figures look, the less of an abstract adjunct to music it is. Andy's v2.5.x sequences often simply do not complement the music well anymore. The program has lost the sense of expressionistic randomness it had in, for example, v2.4.3. If you compare the two versions, you see how many of the figures in 2.4.3 have developed since then, but now they seem so specific that we are seeing something much closer to representational art than before. Nice but not so helpful as an accompanist to the whole range of music out there in the world.

With all due respect, Andy needs to balance his technical knowledge with a greater feeling for and ability to express more appropriate creatively artful design. While planning his future, I hope he takes this point into consideration. Earning a PhD and learning how to express oneself as a creative artist are two very different processes involving completely different energies. What happens from here on will show whether or not Andy will develop into as good an artist as he is a technician. After he leaves the Navy he will finally have adequate time to begin addressing this issue. Until then, I'm sticking with v2.4.3. It runs smoothly on my TiBook/1MHz while v2.5.2 & 3 do not.

User problems here are no different than back in the old days of Darkside and After Dark where many of the ideas seen in G-Force were first made visible to us as we moved from 68k to PPC. When Farmer Bob mentions bloat, he's referring to the additional code which now makes my TiBook choke on it. This is otherwise not a slow machine!

The trouble with trying to run so close to the cutting edge is how much of one's user base just gets left behind. Now that the program costs money, operating standards should be correspondingly higher. Backward compatibility with millions of lower VRAM Macs is critical, IMO. If v2.5.2 et al can't do it, then Andy could at least make certain earlier, leaner iterations available online once again--for the rest of us!