I have held off buying Poser 5 until the spate of bug reports for it has slackened off. I have an ordinary PC with Windows 98. Please:- - Where is a list of the various updates and corrections to Poser 5 and where they can be downloaded? - Where is a list of reported Poser 5 bugs and which of them have been corrected and when?

There is a Read-Me file for download at the Curious Labs site (the page with Poser 5 downloads) which lists all the corrections in the Service Release. I would hesitate to run Poser 5 on a Win 98 machine... The bad memory handling in Win 98 appears to give Poser 5 users problems. You should consider an upgrade to a NT based system (NT/2000/XP) to take full advantage of Poser 5.

Posing is no big deal but the extras like hair and material and firefly render will most likely cause havoc on your win98. Had another user upgrade to more harddrive, more memory (512meg) and xp home and left all other equipment as is... person has had no problems. Only issue they complained about was they couldnt get their tomb raider 1 to run! Moral, if you want to run win9x games, make a dual boot system. I am using P5 almost exclusively now but did cheat and make a new machine with 1gig mem and hundred's of gigabytes of harddrive dedicated to all my 3d programs (left office stuff on old computer).

P5 is also memory intensive. Win98 has an upper limit on the memory it can address for a program, so all that extra memory over 128 meg goes to waste. P5 itself seems to have a memory leak, and combining that problems with the memory limitations of Win 98, you can have some real problems getting things done. I'm running over 700 meg of memory on an XP 1.1 ghz system. I can render 1 or two clothed high res figures (1 V3), after that it becomes too slow for anything useful. P5 will work on a Win 98 system, but it'll be very slow, and you'll hit the memory wall a lot sooner.

win xp.. 1 gig of mem. athlon xp3000.. very fast.. i use the hair room,face room, firlefly... all work very smooth. never crash.. (sorry only 2 problems will make poser crash.. i just avoid them now...) 1) missing textures. (program goes into some time of loop) 2) changing lights sets... with delting old lights.. it gets stuck sometimes.. besides those 2 issues.. i think p5 is very stable..

Anthony, You don't say how fast your PC is. On a 1GHz PC under Win2K Poser 5 is way slower than Poser 4 or ProPack. As pdxjims said, you'll not be able to put in more than a couple of charcters, (or 1 with ERC clothing) before you get Poser 5 dials to behave like Poser 4's do with 5 to 10 characters loaded. But many don't see this as a problem, so either they don't mind the slower or more unpredictable response on the dials (you know, what happens when Poser 4 gets overloaded with figures), they don't use the dials much, or perhaps a much faster CPU will hide this effect. 512MB seems to be a requirement. Going to 1GB made no discernible difference - perhaps not surprising, as it can only use 2GB, which is easy to reach with 512MB of real memory. Serious focus problems are present - at least in the PC version - due to the separate window used for the Parameter Dials. You'll learn to compensate (click to focus before doing anything) but it's a pain, and possibly the task switch done between the Paramter Dial window and the rest of Poser 5 explains some of teh slowdown vis-a-vis Poser 4. And remember that Readscript (read Injection, a la V3) doesn't work in Poser 5 unless you install directly in Poser 5 Runtime (vs. leaving in a linked Poser 4 Runtime). Other than that, most Poser 4 stuff seems to work exactly the same in Poser 5 - bugs and all. Only UI feature that is in Poser 5 and not in ProPack is the handy mini-Camera dials at top right of the Preview window. So unless you expect to be able to make use of at least one of the new Poser 5 features, why would you bother to upgrade? As others noted, Poser's dismal handling of memory effectively relies on the OS to "clean up" for it as it goes. Win9x is not up to that challenge. WinNT will try valiantly, but cannot work miracles ;-) There is no available list of reported bugs. Something that CL really should consider if they want to back up their recently declared 'Focus on quality' with some substance - short of fixing all the bugs, of course ;-) In Poser 5 that is, not a for-more-$ Poser 6, thank you all the same. Who3d made the next best thing to an offical list, with help from many of the EVM, but Rosity chose to nix it when they deleted the Beta forum (rather than simply closing it down to new postings). A good question to put to CL's new CEO though - see link at top of page...

Sorry, what was the question again? After you mentioned that you used Windows 98, I stopped reading. Upgrade your operating system to a proper operation system, then ask the question again. Sorry if this seems rude, but people need to stop trying to run modern software on obsolete operating systems and then asking why it doesn't work properly.

Windows 98 is still the main user OS where I work, with NT for PC servers, (most of which are of a lower spec than most modern desktops) For what it's worth, properly patched and maintained 98 is a very good, and quite stable OS. It's the only thing you can run on some old laptops with limited disk space. You can get the entire OS into about 40Mb, try that with a "supported OS" Though they are right, the 9x OS series (including Me) does have "problems" accessing more the 128Mb of memory via the OS, it's a design flaw/limitiation of the technology. But yeah, for P5, NT or XP, with lots of memory and processor power, I wouldn't want to try it on anything less. later jb

Layingback wrote: You don't say how fast your PC is. On a 1GHz PC under Win2K Poser 5 is way slower than Poser 4 or ProPack. As pdxjims said, you'll not be able to put in more than a couple of charcters, (or 1 with ERC clothing) before you get Poser 5 dials to behave like Poser 4's do with 5 to 10 characters loaded.>>> On windows 98 yes. But like others say, I would upgrade. You need better memory management to run P5. Layingback Wrote: But many don't see this as a problem, so either they don't mind the slower or more unpredictable response on the dials (you know, what happens when Poser 4 gets overloaded with figures), they don't use the dials much, or perhaps a much faster CPU will hide this effect. >>>> On my 1.4ghz 512mb xp system, I could get many characters in P5 at once. I haven't noticed a major slow down unless I'm 5+ hours into the program. However I've noticed this on other 3d apps as well, and found it is best to restart. Layingback wrote: 512MB seems to be a requirement. Going to 1GB made no discernible difference - perhaps not surprising, as it can only use 2GB, which is easy to reach with 512MB of real memory. >>>> I'll Agree. :) Laying back wrote: Serious focus problems are present - at least in the PC version - due to the separate window used for the Parameter Dials. You'll learn to compensate (click to focus before doing anything) but it's a pain, and possibly the task switch done between the Paramter Dial window and the rest of Poser 5 explains some of teh slowdown vis-a-vis Poser 4. >>>>> Perhaps it is just me but my XP system has almost always requires a click to refocus on an proggie. Layingback wrote: And remember that Readscript (read Injection, a la V3) doesn't work in Poser 5 unless you install directly in Poser 5 Runtime (vs. leaving in a linked Poser 4 Runtime). >>> Not true. I created a whole new runtime for V3 and she works very well. The problems comes in moving her around after installation.. People forget to move the extra !daz folder and then redo all the links. Layingback wrote: Other than that, most Poser 4 stuff seems to work exactly the same in Poser 5 - bugs and all. Only UI feature that is in Poser 5 and not in ProPack is the handy mini-Camera dials at top right of the Preview window. So unless you expect to be able to make use of at least one of the new Poser 5 features, why would you bother to upgrade? >>>> True enough though if you don't have propack you might want that, for the multiple camera angles at the least! I'll refrain from comment on the rest. Basically if you do stills or animate from within poser p5 is a good choice. Animation from with out is a bit more tricky. Reiss studios handles all plugins now as far as I can tell, so if you don't want to wait you can go for the older propack plugins. I'm pretty happy with P5, but it does require newer computer systems to really get the most out of. If you have to stick to 98 for now, go with propack.

Ti, Thanks for your differing perspective. Re: "I haven't noticed a major slow down unless I'm 5+ hours into the program." Are you saying that the parameter dials respond as evenly and as smoothly as Poser 4 (or Poser 5 with just one character), when you get 3 or 4 figures (characters or clothing) in Poser 5? No problems with overshoot of the dial, non-linear movement, numeric value changing after you release the mouse from the dial adjustment? Good to know, as that would seem to imply 1.4GHz is fast enough, whereas 1GHz isn't (in my case at least). Re: "Perhaps it is just me but my XP system has almost always requires a click to refocus on an proggie." Agreed, but poser 5 is the only app I know where you have to click to regain focus from within the same application. (No other applciatiosnrunning.) Focus goes to main Poser window when it should be still on the Parameter Dial window. It's a very odd UI design for Windows, but per Stewer works fine on a Mac. And, in my reference to mini-Camera dials at top of Preview window, I was trying to refer to the pan and rotate controls that appear when you select multi-pane view in Poser 5. These I was surprised to find are not part of the ProPack interface.

Layingback: yep that's what I'm saying. your right now that think about it. usually it is not in the same programs. I tend to turn off my param dials till I need them again though. Mini-camera controls. Oh I love these...I pretty much ignore that trackball on the side now. They were not part of pro pack. One of the things I noticed...with queri's help... is that an over large runtime can contribute to slow downs. I've found it is better to have many multiple runtimes(I'm up to 14 now I think) that are smaller, rather than one multigig runtime.

Tirjasdyn, The smaller Runtiem might help - certainly with opening libraries. One thing I noticed with upgrade to ProPack from Poser is that new libraries open slower. A lot slower the first tiem as it builds .png files from the .rsr's - as ReadMe warns about. But is still slower afterwards - similar to Poser 5. I wonder if the code to verify the presence of .png files is the cause... Still confused about the dial performance difference though. A 1.4 vs. a 1GHz doesn't seem enough to account for it. Could be memory (mine's SDRAM 133). But still doesn't seem enough. Could it possibly be XP versus Win2K? These are of course very similar. But if Poser 5 is forcing Windows to effectively do a inter-task context switch and pass data values bacl and forth - becuase of the separate window for the parameter dial - could there be a perfomance difference in XP with respect to task switch time? Perhaps one of the current Windows programmers coudl shed some light?