Over on the AREA Mr Entertainment blog, the Softimage Program Manager has posted a short video that goes over how the CIP progam helps product planning.

On the Softimage list, someone mentioned that they wouldn’t mind turning on CIP, as long as it doesn’t use too many CPU cycles. Now, I don’t know exactly how CPU-intensive the CIP instrumentation is (I don’t think it is all that intensive), but I do remember reading a few things about CIP:

• CIP records a transcript of user activities in the software (eg commands used)
• That transcript is stored in RAM (but there is a limit of something like 2MB)
• At regular intervals, the transcript will be serialized to disk (not in one big file, but in many files…again, as I remember it, there is a file size limit, and a limit to the number of files)
• Every day or so, the transcripts are sent to Autodesk. The send happens only if the current CPU/network/system utilization is really very low. That is, it won’t be sent if you’re in the middle of playing back a scene and using the CPU.

Interestingly, while poking around on my own system a few weeks ago, I disabled CIP, either by editing a .MC3 file or changing a registry setting. Now I cannot enable CIP from inside Softimage, and I don’t remember what I changed 🙂