Bryce3D: Working with OS X 10.4.5

Last year, I happened to purchase the latest Bryce3D package from DAZ3D. All was going well until I upgraded to OS X v10.4.

See, unlike Microsoft, Apple isn’t afraid to move the operating system ahead in terms of features and security patches even if it breaks something. They’re good about letting their developers know something agressive is coming out, and that they’ll need to fix it.

Take a case of memory management. In Windows, you could request some memory, use it, and then release it (so it’s not yours anymore), but some applications continued to use that memory (by accident!), and by sheer dumb luck, the application still ‘worked. ‘ Windows is wrong, because the specification and implementation should never allow that; the application designer is wrong because they have a serious bug. But in this example, the two problems appear to cancel themselves out.

Now, fast-forward to the next release of the operating system — Microsoft has fixed the problem. However, users pulling an old game off the shelf would quickly find the game crashing. And, who do they blame? Microsoft. The should be blaming the game designer, but from their stand point, that’s not what changed because it ‘used’ to work.

Here’s the bad and ugly. Microsoft’s solution has been to maintain backwards compatability for the user. They make a special exception in their operating system that says if the user is trying to run that specific old application, then re-emulate the buggy behavior so the thing will work. This creates bloat and future security holes.
Apple does not do this. Apple fixes the problem so things work as they are supposed to, and the application developer is quickly forced to correct the problem. Suddenly we find the application is well behaved, and not only does it work on the new operating system, but it works better on the old one. It’s a win-win. And, yes, it’s true there are cases where one library is replaced with another not-so-similar library that has enhanced features, but this event is rare and not impossible to deal with.

Such was the case of Bryce 3D. The latest OS improvements exposed a problem, and that problem was easily fixed in terms of an update. Problem was, many users were having a terrible time getting the Bryce 5.5c update to work.

Like many cases of support, sometimes when you have a small handful of users having a problem, and a large body of users who don’t have the problem, it isn’t cost effective to go digging out what’s happening. Let’s face it, the majority of those kind of problems are often user created. But what happens when it is actually real?

While I can’t prove it, I think that’s the case with what happened with Bryce’s installer. Something about the patch’s install doesn’t quite set up the files as they should be. To document this, I made a humorous little movie of the actual Bryce 5.5c upgrade install process happening. You get to see that things aren’t right when it’s done.

Luckily, I managed to figure out how to twiddle things back with a simple hack, rendering the software useable again. I hope DAZ3D investigates and corrects the installation process, if that’s where the problem is.