I actually never upgraded past Bryce 3, and I haven't even fired it up for almost a year to boot; I do know that newer versions allow animation and greater texturing capabilites. To my knowledge, the modeller hasn't changed. I know Corel owns it now, and well, I've never really liked Corel, so I don't think I'm going to bother getting back into Bryce.
For the uninitiated, Bryce is a landscape modelling/rendering program. It has one of the best sky renderers available for under $5K. One of the great things about it is that is extremely easy to learn and make fun stuff with right away, but allows you to get really into what you're doing and make some rather spectacular stuff. Most software with such a low learning curve tends to impose much stricter limitations on what you can do with it.
Note that one of Eric Wagner's (the guy who originally wrote Bryce) other programs, Metasynth ( (url="http://"http://www.metasynth.com")http://www.metasynth.com(/url) ), is a big favorite of mine as well. You can do some really neat stuff with it right out of the box, but if you spend some time probing it's depths it can actually do just about any type of audio synthesis you can imagine (I wrote a speech synthesizer for it in the form of a typeface).
Regarding EV, I actually played it quite a bit when it came out. I think I still have my reg code around here somewhere. I wrote a simple plugin, but was kind of irked to find it under the 'cheats' section. Oh well. I downloaded it and immediately noticed that my spelling has improved over the past two years. 
I'd take up your offer to go hang out on the board, but...
The assignment I have at this place that doesn't have me doing a whole lot (which is why I've had the time to write these longer posts) is ending later this week, and I've got some time to myself again, so you may not see me for a while.
But when you do, I might have music and mocked up screenshots and a full-on promo website for my first CS effort, a horror game tentatively titled 'Hideaway.' This isn't "Kill the endless Zombies" horror, either, this is more along the lines of HP Lovecraft and Orson Welles... setting the mood properly is the key to pulling it off and this is one of the reasons I want to write my own music.
------------------
--You notice that you have been turned into a pile of ashes.
(This message has been edited by sanehatter (edited 12-06-2000).)
