Whatever happened to Bryce?
Commodore 64
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Why would a company buy Bryce, make 1 update to it, and then let it die a slow and painful death? The two programs seemed great together? Also will they ever move away from DAZ 3D and just let you export to your favorite rendeder?
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Daz did do the Bryce 5.5 the Bryce 6 and Bryce 7 upgrades. IMO Daz is a 3D content company , not so much a software development company , meaning they depend on the sell of content as their primary source of income. ( not so much as their software products, that's why Studio is free) The fact is, the only software Daz has built from the ground up is Studio. All other were acquired from previous developers. IMO Daz does not sell enough units of any of the software they acquired or content for Bryce or any other software they acquired at this point to warrant an upgrade. ( they would lose $$$)
As S Ray said, Daz 3D is a content company. They started to create content for Poser and when it looked like Poser would go under (which it hasn't), Daz started their Studio project, purchased Bryce 5 from Corel, Carrara 3? and Hexagon from Eovia to have more applications that can use their (and, in the case of Hexagon, create) content. Indeed, the upgrade from Bryce 5 to 5.5 was to add the Studio bridge. We've seen updates for Bryce from 5.5 to 6.1, 6.3 (mostly Mac bug fixes) to 7.1 while Carrara is now at 8.5 and Hexagon at 2.5. With the materials or shaders optimised for Studio/Iray, content got very elaborate to adapt for non Studio/Iray 3D applications. It is obvious that continuing Carrara development and bring Bryce to 64 bit would be a lengthy and expensive endavour.
Because of the community following - if they could open-source it (which I'm sure is a licensing nightmare) then someone could run with the source and use the Daz3D SDK to integrate some of the tools into Studio - like the terrain editors, instancing, materials lab. It would be a lengthy process, but it wouldn't cost Daz much as they're practically giving it away to begin with. Building terrains in Daz to compliment scene design seems like a legitimate and complimentary idea and it would help drive their online marketplace. I looked at the SDK at one point, but everything else got in the way.
The program has such a following though, I feel like this way, people could continue to create content for the marketplace, keep what is great about the tool, and move it to a platform that already leverages CUDA/iRay, 64-bit addressing, and multi-core processors.
Just my $0.02...