Orio opened this issue on Oct 01, 2003 ยท 11 posts
layingback posted Tue, 21 October 2003 at 10:37 AM
An .rsr is an .rsr is a .rsr. All Macs (MacOS) have a good solid clean file structure with the instruction (code) part of the file separated from the data (image) part. (Whereas Windoze files muddle it all up - and if you want to see the potential outcome of that approach just consider your weekly pilgrimage to Windoze Update!) It's in all files. It's called the Resource Fork. If you just format a floppy on a Mac for a PC and read it on a PC you'll see the Resource Fork for the file system sat there as a hidden file. The .rsr is simply the home of the part of the file that was the Resource Fork on the Mac. Rather than "properly" porting Poser from the Mac to the PC, Metacreations just created a concept of a .rsr file and shoved everything from a file's resource fork into a file named with the same root filename stem, but with extension of .rsr. (This "quick port" from Mac to PC is IMHO the main reason why the PC version of Poser, PP and Poser 5 have so many legacy problems on the PC. These problems don't exist on the Mac, and because the code was never really ported to the PC, it can't be debugged on the PC using modern tools. Ergo we're stuck with an ever growing list of legacy bugs.) This .rsr approach is a cop-out for a number of reasons. The primary one being that we now have 2 files holding the data that originally was designed to be in one single file. And the code only expected one so there is no code to deal with half the data going AWOL, so if the info in the .rsr file ever gets out-of-step with that of its corresponding "master" file, we're in trouble. How much damage is done by deleting the .rsr file depends on how much valuable data is in the .rsr file in question. Delete one from a library and you lose all the image data - i.e. the pict image, so you get the shruggy fella. Delete one from Geometry and Poser has to rebuild it. Delete it from Poser.exe and there are no images available for the Poser application - can you spell NoGO ;-)