Is there an ETA on the next Moho patch?

[stealingfeathers]

Hello Everyone

This is mainly for moderators who work at Smith Micro / Moho. I'm curious to know if there is another patch for Moho 12 coming soon, and here's why:

We just completed the semester at the college where I teach online beginner and intermediate animation. I've been teaching with Anime Studio for quite awhile, and of course now Moho. We had a pretty terrible semester with Moho Pro. Not as much with the beginner class with Debut - this is probably because they don't do anything complex and their animations are very basic. My intermediate animation students complained about Moho Pro lagging, freezing and crashing A LOT. Some of them posted very negative reviews on the formal course evaluation. They were happy with the course content but very unhappy with the software. One student said he felt very ripped off on his purchase of Moho Pro.

It's not just my students who have been having the issues. In case your first thought may be that they didn't have very good computers. I have experienced a lot more freezing/crashing issues with Moho 12 as compared to some of the previous versions of the software and I have a very powerful system. I can see on Lost Marble forums that you have a number of users reporting issues since the Moho 12 release, so there is good feedback coming your way.

I'm worried that my online campus dean won't let me continue to use Moho for this class if I have another semester with a lot of complaints from the students. I love this software and I don't want to go back to using Adobe Animate for the courses I teach. I simply prefer Moho by a big margin. Is there a substantial Moho patch coming up? I'm so hoping...

Sorry if this has been long-winded. I love Moho and enjoy teaching others how to use it. I've been pleased with the improvements over the years and I want it to succeed.

Thanks,
RR

[synthsin75]

No moderators here work for Smith Micro, and those who may know about any updates have likely signed nondisclosure agreements, so they can't legally say.

Considering the recent shake up at SM, I wouldn't expect any free update to Moho 12.

Not all users are reporting these sort of problems with Moho, so it's likely system dependent. Even some pros that use Moho daily for work haven't seen these issues. If AS11 was more stable for you, maybe you'd do better using that for your class?

[stealingfeathers]

Thanks. I thought there were at least 2 moderators here who work for SM. I didn't know about the recent shake up at SM. Ugh. What was that?

Anyway, I definitely heard fewer complaints when we were using AS11. It will become harder over time for the students to purchase the educational discount on older versions of the software. That's a substantial savings on Pro (Debut doesn't matter as much). Students get a 40% discount.

I know that not all users are having issues. It was frustrating for me to hear so many more complaints than I'm used to. Seems to be more from Windows than Mac.

I'll just keep hoping for the best.

RR

[Greenlaw]

I use Moho pretty much every day where I work. I do think 12.2 crashes more than 11 did during animation but it really hasn't been that bad for us--obviously, not enough to stop us from using it every day. In fact, the Batch Renderer in ASP 11 used to crash like crazy but I have never seen Moho's Batch Renderer (now called Moho Exporter,) crash once in the last year or so that we've been using it.

One important note: If you haven't already done so, I highly advise you to turn off AutoSave in Moho 12. There is definitely something wrong with this feature and it will probably corrupt your file when there is a crash. IMO, the current AutoSave may even contribute to crashing.

I think it's much more reliable to just make a lot of manual incremental saves while working on a scene. Even back when AutoSave worked more reliably, I still saved many versions of my files as i worked on them. This is something I normally do in any program I'm working in because it can be catastrophic to lose work when you have a deadline to meet.

Apart from that, Moho 12 has been pretty rock solid for us.

[Greenlaw]

But to answer your question (or rather, not answer your question,) I have no idea if and when there will be another patch. I'm really hoping for some fixes too, like the random issue with Reference Layers mentioned elsewhere, and much needed fixes/improvements to the Freehand/Blob Brush drawing tools. Maybe Rafael or somebody on the development team will be allowed to share some info before too long. (Fingers crossed.)

[stealingfeathers]

Okay, thanks for the tip. Auto save is now off. I'll tell my students to disable it. I save constantly anyway - that's just a habit I learned from a million years ago. I've actually had very good luck with my recovered files and have been grateful for them. They seem to come out fine as long as they get renamed right away before I resume work on them. I agree with you about batch render. I gave up on it with AS11 but I've had good luck with it in M12.

Believe me, I'm not giving up on M12. I love the way the software has evolved. I've been the sole advocate for using it at my college and got worried after seeing so many student complaints in the course evaluations. If the college is willing to leave the decision up to me, I'll insist we hang in there. So, fingers crossed and onward!

RR

[chucky]

Yes , I would blame autosave, it is common in many apps that autosave causes crashes quite understandably I think, even so autosave should be a safe option rather than a dangerous one.

[Ahroo]

For what it's worth, this was posted by someone to the Moho-Pros Facebook group on May 13:

I corresponded with Smith Micro per E-Mail last week and they assured me that theyre still fully commited to the software and that an Update (not Upgrade) will be released in a few weeks.

[stealingfeathers]

Awesome. And, I forgot about the Moho FB page. Thanks for sharing.

RR