Software back in the hands of the user

i just joined ScriptSpot today and thought i would write a little, that way all those who read this will hopefully get involved, my main passions in life are Lighting and 3D modelling, have to admit im a little better at the former than the latter. i started my interest back in the days of Turbo silver, Imagine, Lightwave and of course 3d Studio, which was then dos based, and look at it now, anyway as i said earlier i work in lighting, basically that involves me flashing lights with a midi keyboard, fun job, but incredibly frustrating, mainly because all the lighting patterns i can think of are either to wrapped up in tech stuff, or it takes too long to produces the complexity i can picture, believe me i must have downloaded every piece of show control software that i can find, even the one i use at work is better than most, but still frustrates me, so i got to thinking. what would be a better system, well obviously because the lights i use have a lot of moving features such as pan and tilt, colour changes, pattern wheel changes(Gobos) focus and prism, now i know all this sounds technical, and thats part of the problem, the guys who write these programs really seem to have gotten lost in the computer side of things, so i thought, why can a whole community together, write the different aspects for a plugin that would use all the features that max offers to do the work and just build an interface that is based on logic and common sense with zero learning curve, it is possible, but it needs freedom from both financial constraints and commercial competition pressure, in other words it needs to be written by people who love doing this and without concern for other products, mainly because of how unique this will be. So here i am with an idea, and a goal, to change the way that lighting control software is used, and that will be down to how natural the GUI is, if this is successful then other applications could be used as the engine and The GUI written by those who use the product in a more real world siuation. But back to this project at hand, my plan is to first get the outline features designed conceptually, by that time i am hoping that there will be a few people interested in bringing something like this to a very very large industry, think stage film and television, i am approximating i will need 5 main people, one to handle each main area, obviously its not just a project open to 5 people, so there would be a need for a heirarchy to be in place.

This is basically a volunteer program to begin with, on completion the idea is ultimately for Autodesk to view it as a viable Add on as a future update, i do believe that it is entirely possible for that to happen.

so if anyone wants to get involved and produce what could an amazing plugin leave me a message.

                                                                                                                                          Michael