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AI to Save the Day?

Rashad CarterRashad Carter Posts: 1,832
edited October 13 in Bryce Discussion

Heya everyone!

I'm always kicking up dust in some way, hopeful we can keep this discussion healthy and civil, so as not to trigger moderation actions. I am hoping for a logic based discussion with emotions under wraps so signals travel clearly.

Debated with mysefl the last few days about the wisdom of starting this thread at all, but I'm really curious to hear what other people in our amazing community are thinking. And I think now is the time for this discussion.

So....

A single person and his team vibe coded the complete Adobe suite of applications in roughly a week. They reverse engineered them, built them on top of a more modern coding language (Rust), and while it doesn't yet reach full parity with the Adobe versions, there's no reason to think that at this pace within a few more weeks they might be able to iron out most of the bugs and reach full parity.

It was Clean Room project, which meant that absolutely no original closed source code was copied. Instead, desired workflows and tool usage results were fed into the AI (Claude Opus 5.5). Due to his extreme familiarity with the Adobe applications as a user, he was qualified to test features and return back additional prompts until the AI recreated the desired results.They also apparently used reverse engineering tools, some of which have been around since the 1990's. But until recently, the tools though available took incredible amounts of human investment, and thus, very few applications were ever reverse engineered. What no one can be certain of, is if Adobe will eventually seek damages against this guy's coding team. Because in this case they literally tried to copy the exact workflow etc, hard to know which parts of Adobe are protected in enforceable ways.  He did this as a spite directly to Adobe, and will likely undermine Adobe's hold. He did not ask Adobe how they'd feel about it.

So now it seems, coding itself (assuming consumer AI usage prices don't crash correct and suddenly skyrocket!!), it's now feasible to approach projects using AI, that would have been impractical for paid human programmers.

What's this got to do with Bryce?

Right now nothing. But...consider the possibilities.

Bryce, though complex, is likely far less complex than 7 Adobe applications combined. Bryce was written on what is considered now to be ancient code. But it's good solid code for its time, nearly state of the art. One of the biggest hurdles to further development, aside from low user demand, was the incredible cost for programmers to look and find what each of these ancient arguments was even intended to do. All the dll libraries and what not, insurmountable if handled by skilled human programmers alone. 64bit? Can't happen without a near complete re-write of nearly every one of the millions of lines of code in Bryce.

Unlike the guy replacing Adobe because he was tired of the subscription b.s., Bryce is owned by Daz3d and as a community we adore Daz3d. We don't want to undermine them in any way. We know they have had no choice but to freeze Bryce development due to the expenses and low user demand already discussed.

But what if we as a community, said, "Heya Daz3d, we love Bryce, and we think we could as a community vibe code a new application, that loads and reads Bryce saved files without needing to ever share or distrubute any copyrighted Bryce code, with new coding language, state of the art features, and an entire new content pipeline for products related to this new application. Do you allow us to do this with your blessing?

Software will NEVER be the same. Vibe Coding, in just two years, has completley altered the way software development will move forward. Years turns into weeks. I have vibe coded some things myself, and to be honest, its pretty amazing. And the sky is pretty much not even a limit anymore. Bryce is exactly the type of project this modern approach was designed to tackle. Anyone can pretty much create anything if they know what their desired results are.

So all this to reach these questions:

1. If there was a new modern landscaping application very similar in feeling and spirit to Bryce, that was able to load and render Bryce saved files, would you use it?
2. If Daz3d would indeed sanction such a community development, would you be willing to help participate in the effort with your own time and energy?

I have not approached Daz3d about this at all yet, as I don't see any point if the community at large is against such an idea. And I'm 100% certain this is NOT something I could take up on my own. I dont have the time or the skill to take on every single feature set from terrains, to volumetrics, to the DTE, to the this and the that......each one needs someone skilled in that area to know how close to correct we are getting. It means the AI will need to write all it's own solutions to the protected procedural functions, which means the procedurals will never be exactly the same, but could well end up extremely similar.

Anyow, let me know what you think. Is this a chance for us to finally bring Bryce (or something Bryce-like) into the modern day? Or should we not even attempt something like this?

I'll be the first to admit there are many legal questions I cannot answer, but in the current climate permission isnt even required. anyone can build a Bryce of their own if they want, just can;t call it Bryce, but you get the picture. Personally, I'd want Daz3d to know and be aware of any such projects and be supportive in the effort.

Thanks for your time everyone! Happy Bryceing!

Post edited by Rashad Carter on

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