Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1667344

My Poser 5 jams on loading scenes or saved character combinations with several characters (say, a few fully-equipped divers) which my Poser 4 (4.0.3 without PPP) always handled successfully. That is unacceptable for me with the sort of scene that I make. How can I make my Poser 5 accept scenes with more characters in? It jammed on:- - A character which is 6 divers sitting in an inflatable boat. The boat is a character. - A .PZ3 file with 3 frogmen riding in my new subskimmer prop and 3 sport divers in the water (as at this link). -- My Poser 4 handled both successfully. When I use my Poser 4, after I installed Poser 5, Poser 4 comes up with the stage size and lights at factory default, and also all 3 lights turned off, regardless of what is specified in the ---.pz3 file, and the ground prop does not appear until I have clicked round a bit. That is likely due to Poser 5's workings interfering with Poser 4. Is there any way to cure this? Or do I have to uninstall Poser 5 and write its cost off to experience? I just tried to call my subskimmer scene .PZ3, using Poser 4. Up came an empty stage set to factory default but with all 3 lights switched off. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. I suspect that I will have to uninstall Poser 5 and then re-install Poser 4 to overwrite the damage that the Poser 5 caused.

I have the same trouble in P5 with many characters in a scene, it slows to a crawl and sometimes quits completely. P4/PP handles these same scenes with ease. I guess with P5 you're just stuck making smaller scenes. I, too, noticed changes in my P4 setup after installing P5 but I don't remember exactly what they were. However, they were nowhere near as bad as the problem you have. I woulnd't now how to fix it, sorry. Good luck.

Say it ain't so! I've been teetering on the cusp of ordering P5 the last few days, so this isn't what I wanted to hear. I was thinking most of this kind of thing had been worked out and P5 was pretty stable by now. Hopefully somebody will jump in here and straighten things out. Credit card back in the wallet for now -- I'll be watching this one to see if the fix for you is an acceptable one.

P5 needs a lot more memory. I have both PP and P5 on my computer, for precisely this reason. For scenes with a lot of characters, or very large textures, PP will handle scenes that P5 chokes on. But all in all, I prefer working in P5. I like the interface better. I like multiple runtimes. I love the power of the cloth room and the material room. And atmospheric effects! But when I want to do a render of the entire Dallas Cowboys football team, I don't do it in P5. There are ways to tweak your settings to maximize memory and speed things up. Make sure you have the latest service release installed. (And hopefully, SR4 - due at the end of this month, hopefully! - will fix even more problems.) Make sure your swap file is the right size for your system. Keep your main runtime lean and mean; install stuff into other runtimes instead. (Since you can, with P5.) Remove Content Paradise. As for the lights - it may be a memory issue. I've noticed Poser does weird things to the default settings file when it's having memory problems. I can switch between P5 and PP with no problem. (Though I've noticed that they open with different default cameras as the default.) I've never used P4, so I don't know how well it plays with P5. Why don't you post your system specs? People might have suggestions for you. CPU, hard drive space, RAM, OS, etc.?

Can't offer any advice, but I have what I consider to be a modest mid- to low-range system (Windows XP, Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, 120GB hard drive), and was recently able to construct and render a scene containing:

six characters -- the DAZ Charger and reindeer, Penny, a modified version of Victoria, and a couple of custom-made figures

additional figures like the DAZ Sleigh, reins, and reindeer harness, conforming clothing for Victoria and Penny, my conforming mane and transmapped tail figures, and the DAZ Cyclorama

Over a dozen props, including a dynamic clothing item I draped over the Charger

And I made use of displacement, specular mapping, and other advanced features, also. It took a while to render at 1600x1200, but it didn't choke.

P5 couldn't render the scene under Win98, but under WinXP handled things nicely.

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?forum_id=28

Anthony, check out my tips on five things to speed up poser 5, and I think you might get some use out of it. As a general rule, however, Poser 5 should NOT be installed to the same local folder as Poser 4 -- the two do not play well and are much more like siblings with issues than friendly players.

I was one of the people that pre-ordered P5, what we got was a beta program that would barely run. I was not happy with it at all. SR3 made a big difference, but P5 still don`t work quite right, and I am anxiously awaiting SR4.

I hated it and took it off my computer. I pr-orded it too. My Kitty likes to play with it, it rolls real nice.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1667344

Results of some tests. - I am on a works pension and I have to watch the odd 50's and 100's, so I have to think carefully about spending. - I have Poser 4.0.3 without PPP. - I have Windows 98. I don't want the expense of upgrading my Windows unless I am VERY VERY VERY sure that the result won't have bugs or bad side effects or incompatibities. - I have Poser 5 including "Service Release 3 for Poser 5 by Curious Labs". - This link is my subskimmer scene. It contains 38 characters. 6 of them are wetsuitmen, 1 is my subskimmer boat, 2 are my raygun, the rest are diving gear of various file sizes. And 8 props including the ground (which I use recolored as the sea). - Poser 4 before I installed Poser 5 :: loaded and rendered OK.

---

• Poser 5: it jams if I try to load a scene that big, whether as a .PZ3 file or as a big multiple character. - - - - - -

• Poser 4 after I installed Poser 5:- (I reassigned the extension -.PZ3 to call Poser 4. I left the extension -.PZZ alone to call Poser 5.) - Clicking on a -.PZ3 file always results in an empty stage at factory default but with all 3 lights set "off". Also, when I click the little triangles below the stage, the names of the lights and ground don't appear until I have clicked around a bit. - Calling a big multiple character from library (6 divers in an inflatable boat): loaded to stage without complaint, but the lights stayed off and the stage stayed factory default size. - I copied my subskimmer scene --.PZ3 as --.CR2 but left its lights and cameras and universe etc in it. I moved the copy into one of my character library folders. I loaded it into my Poser 4. It loaded OK and the lights and the stage size and the stage background color went OK. - - - - - -

Please advise.

The biggest part of the new things in Poser 5 seems to be the materials system. The only time I needed anything like that was an army camouflage texture for my man in boilersuit (in a Sea Patrol scene), and I did that thus: In Bryce look straight down, texture the ground plane, render, save, use the result as a Poser 4 color texture map. Also, thank God that I had already copied my Poser 4 and Bryce 4 serial numbers onto another piece of paper, as I could not find the original boxes with them on, but I found that copy. (I have now copied them on again onto another piece of paper.) Of the people who ask for serial numbers, I suspect that some are genuine and not warez'ing.

Anthony, there is a BIG difference regarding memory handling between Win98/ME and 2000/XP. Poser5 definitely needs more memory than Poser4/PP. Even Poser4/PP behaves better on 2000/XP. Before investing anything in graphic software, upgrade to XP and get as much memory as possible. I have XP with 1GByte Memory and I don't have the problems other people have. I saw a lot of posts of people having problems with Poser, Vue or other applications here. A lot of them were using Win98/ME. It's very often a memory issue.

I agree with ynsaen poser 4 and poser 5 should be installed seperately as two seperate programs, you can still use the poser 4 stuff in poser 5 if you add the runtime to poser 5. You could use the poser 4 renderer in poser 5 if you don`t need the firefly renderer things. With poser 5 you can make the water have real reflections and with service release 3, the atmosphere tool is good for volumetric lights (the type where you see the beam).

I can't say anything about Poser 5, but I'd definitely recommend getting a newer OS. It was quite normal for me to reformat and reinstall Windows 98 every 12-18 months or so, but Windows 2000 is one of the best investments I've made for my PC. Everything just works better, and keeps on doing so. XP may be as good, but I haven't felt a pressing need to spend my own money to get whatever advantages it offers; I'm not really sure there are any.

What Bob said. P5 may never run very well under Win98. Either XP or 2000 would be much better.

Anthony; Check out any computer shows that come your way. You can obtain an OEM version of Win2kPro for around $80 US. As you have 98, if you wanted to you could set up 2k on a seperate partition, and have a dual boot system. That would give you all the backwards compatibility that XP claims, and the NT kernel benefits of 2k, which is what XP is built on.

I don't know that it's worth setting up a dual-boot system these days. It used to be, but because XP is based on NT, most programs these days run on 2000 just fine. My home computer is XP (recently upgraded from 98), and my office computer is 2000, and there's very little that won't run on both. Even most games run fine on 2000 nowadays.

Anyone who is contemplating P5 should read the threads here about it. It has problems. It's a memory hog and has (in my opinion) a memory leak. It's really too big a program to run on Win98 effectivly, since Win98 has memory limitations of it's own. It also requires a large swap file to handle files of any size. Many of it's advertised features do not work properly. It's slower than P4. We've had 3 major service releases, and are expecting a 4th. We're not even sure what the 4th service pack will fix (or break). DO NOT BUY P5 IF YOU THINK SR4 WILL SOLVE ALL OF THE P5 PROBLEMS! That said, is you have a big machine and are running Win2K or XP, it's not really that bad. The Firefly engine does some very nice rendering (when it works). The material, cloth, and setup rooms are great. True, face and hair suck, but we can't really expect it to work as advertised, can we?

Hair doesn't suck. You just have to futz around with the settings a lot. (See Stew's amazing rat fur over at the DAZ forums!) And the atmospheric settings are really cool, too. I bet Anthony could do some awesome underwater effects with the atmospheric settings...

I use poser 5 with windows 98SE with no problems, though I have not actually tried rendering 6 figures with it yet.

Personally I've never had any of the major problems with 5 that I've read about in various threads. I've rendered scenes with MANY Daz Generation 3 characters (up to 9 is all I've tried so far) all clothed and "accessorized" plus environmental props and characters. I've done this boh in firefly (a vastly superior renderer to the p4 renderer if you configure it properly) and in p4 renderer with very few problems (mostly with high poly hair models) I usually have photoshop open in the background. My machine is hardly "top of the line" . It only a 1.5 GHZ with 768 MB ram. I think the key here is XP. 98 just doent handle memory as well as xp does. XP isn't a panacea but I think it will help you out immensely. That combined with seperating your p4 and p5 should benefit you quite a bit. Yes P5 has a small memery leak, but its nothing that can't be purged with free utilities. If you think p5 is memory intensive, try maya or 3ds. You might as well not even have IE running with either of those two.

My computer's the opposite for some reason... if I try to bring 3 V2 characters into Poser 4, they will start coming in with body parts missing but with Poser 5 I can bring in 8-10 V2 characters with no problems. Don't know why but I always had bugs with P4 but have only ever had 1 crash with P5 in the year and a half I've used it.

I have had no problems with poser 5 since I installed sr3 and I use win98se. I would recommend anyone who hasn`t downloaded sr3 to get it now.

When installing new things, props, figures etc, I install them into poser 4, that way they can be used in poser 4 AND poser 5. If you install them into poser 5 then they wont work in poser 4 too. Of course, if it is a poser 5 only thing then I will install it in the poser 5 folder.

"Say it ain't so! I've been teetering on the cusp of ordering P5 the last few days, so this isn't what I wanted to hear." It isn't an intrinsic problem with Poser5. Look, in a lot of ways P5 is a bigger proram than P4. It has an entirely new rendering system, dynamic hair and cloth and completely node based materials system. So it is a bit much to expect it to run on a 6 year old operating system (win 98) and a smallish computer without problems. If you can't affort a reasonably modern OS or to keep your hardware up to date then you might need to accept that there will be problems for youw ith a lot of software, not just Poser5. It's unfortunate, but true. Developers simply cannot always code for the stuff from half a decade ago.

I have to say that despite my misgivings about P5 I bit the bullet and bought the damn thing. And... I love it! It has a few weird quirks but nothing major. I think the firefly renderer is reasonably fast for what it does, too. I've known P4PP take longer to render a few seemingly complex scenes. I'm running on a 1GB XP machine and I'd recommend XP to anyone using Poser 4/PP or P5 on a PC. My P4PP ran like a sick dog on 98 but really improved when I upgraded the machine and OS.

{My Kitty likes to play with it, it rolls real nice. } I thought this list would be a bit off-topic, but since someone else mentioned it... 10) Play "spot the not" with the box: read the list of features on back of the box and check off the ones that are (still) not working properly. 9) The Poser 5 box on the shelf makes you look like a professional graphic designer. 8) The listing of features on the box makes it sound like you have a powerful "character solution" software. 7) The manual is thick enough to prop up that wobbly table. 6) The manual is thick enough to use as a decent paperweigh. 5) "Spot the not" with the manual: follow the chapters and see how many instructions don't work the way they're supposed to. 4) Play a rousing game of "How long until it crashes". Open P5, load some figures, start posing, and see how long it takes until it crashes. Prizes will be awarded to people who can keep it running longed than the currect record of 10 minutes. 3) The CD has an excellent refective surface, perfect for use as a mirror. 2) The CD make an excellent mini-frisbee. And the #1 fun thing to do with Poser 5: 1) Cry about the fact that you paid $350 for piece of software that you won't use because it's so buggy and that the company won't take back even though it probably violates the implied warranty of being a usable product. Oh, wait, this isn't fun. This is sad. When is Poser 6 supposed to come out?

(1) I uninstalled Poser 5. After that and a badly overdue defragment run, my Poser 4.0.3 starts up correctly now. It still acts up on very big .PZ3's, but I can dodge that. Copy, rename the copy as ---.CR2 , put it in a character library, start Poser, load the .CR2 file to stage. Its cameras and lights etc will overrule those that were in the startup. (2) I'll re-install my Poser 5 when Curious Labs brings up a downloadable upgrade that can run at least as many characters and props on stage as Poser 4 can, including under Windows 98. Some people can't keep on buying more Windowses (let alone more computers) and having to reinstall all their software and files every time they upgrade.

lol, I've had poser 5 open (complete with scene editing/rendering/animating/etc) literally for the last 72+ hours, no problems.... I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's not the utter crap many purport it to be.

IMHO, two things tend to cause the bulk of problems with Poser 5, and those two things are the reason I wrote the 5 Things bit. The first of those two reasons for issues is the software environment. Most systems are either off the shelf and cluttered with mfg crud, or home built and cluttered with "utilities" crud to make things work "better". The second of these is the fact that P5 is not P4: it doesn't act like P4, it doesn't look like P4, it doesn't do things the way P4 did them, it doesn't do what for four years P4 did and everyone got really used to and figured out and all sorts of good stuff. It requires you to stop and learn it's stuff. Not always a happy thing, as when you know you can do something really quick and easily in P4, and then you go to P5 and you find that your shortcuts are gone, it really sorta pisses you off. Them's the breaks. My hubby used a certain card program for years. Then, one day, the maker of that program put in a lot of new features and changed the way it looked. Hubby had a cow when I installed it on his system (at his request) and wanted me to take it off. I said no. It took him 6 months to figure it out, but now he gets more done, faster, and he likes the results better. But he did sorta set it aside for a couple months. It heped that he kept seeing me do cool things with it (on purpose) becuase then he wanted to know how. That's the other issue. The environmental issue with it is one that also gets folks upset, because we all have things we like to have running -- little things that help us out, and do other tasks for us. Hubby has about six of them he swears he can't live without, and gee, his system isn't quite as friendly to stuff like P5. Anthony, I will take a look at your scene later today and see what I can come up with. My system is an Athlon 2400+ with 384MB of RAM on XP. I've done some really complex scenes before with it, and I think I could likely come close. And, by the way - you've made some great stuff. Thanks for sharing them :)

Attached Link: http://www.delorie.com

Re message 26, it is time the Poser software source form was made public like the Gnu software is, so that many people can look at it in spare time and find and correct bugs and inefficiencies etc in it. Re 4) in message 26: even in my short usage of Poser 5, I had crashes.

John, I got a laugh out of your top ten list. You could even add 1 - if you hang up your Poser CD in your garden, it may scare pesky birds away from your fruit trees, when its shiny side rotates in the wind. But seriously, you can't collect from (or sue) a software company for a defective product, because all their licenses have a clause that states explicitly that the software is not guaranteed to work. Whether it's Windows XP, Poser or some other 3D software, the vendors are never gonna guarantee that it will work. One tip for those with problems: it may boil down to the OS. IOW, Poser is not compatible with the closed-source, security-flawed Windows OS. Ask owners of other machines with some other OS if they have the same problems. If they don't, maybe you might consider switching.

I don't understand why people keep making excuses for poorly-written software. "IMHO, two things tend to cause the bulk of problems with Poser 5...The first of those two reasons for issues is the software environment. Most systems are either off the shelf and cluttered with mfg crud, or home built and cluttered with "utilities" crud to make things work "better". Why then do many people having trouble with P5 don't experience problems with their other programs? In my case: Photoshop 6 & 7, Carrara 1.1, Vue4, Bryce4, Painter 7, MS Office XP Developer's Edition, various games, etc, etc, etc. Why is it that only P5 requires a stripped machine? "The second of these is the fact that P5 is not P4: it doesn't act like P4, it doesn't look like P4, it doesn't do things the way P4 did them..." I disagree. It's been pretty much established that P5 IS P4 with some very minor changes and a bunch of 3rd party apps tacked on. Same program core, same bugs. LOL @ JohnRender!!!

"4) Play a rousing game of "How long until it crashes". Open P5, load some figures, start posing, and see how long it takes until it crashes. Prizes will be awarded to people who can keep it running longed than the currect record of 10 minutes." Current record for me is over three days -- poser up the whole whole time, with likely 9 hours a day of posing while I created an animation set. Except, darn, you know, it never crashed... Amazingly sad. I'm out of this thread.

Poser 5 has some great features, the cloth room is excellent, the materials are great and they are much more advanced than in p4 you can do reflections in renders and make a fur effect with the displacement mapping. The firefly renderer is very good too. It is not just "p4 with some minor changes". I am sick of hearing people complaining about it.

Would it be fair to say that most of the power-users of P5 still bounce back and forth between it and older versions?

That's what its sounding like so far. Either folks put it back on the shelf for now or, if they stuck with it, still have one foot in P4 & PP. (that's not too bad, I could deal with that).

I must confess I do still use poser 4 with propack too. I use it for making figures as it is slightly faster than p5 and I don`t have to change the screen resolution to use propack.

Personally never owned p4. Played with it on a work computer a while ago (before p5 was out) and didnt care for it. It felt too limited, especially in the texturing,rendering and the lighting aspect (I'm used to maya's node based texturing). The lighting in p5 still needs a lot of work, but the other aspects have improved hugely. Yes it initially had it's problems, but all things factored in, it's a pretty decent package now. Especially considering the price compared to other 3d "character solutions"

I never owned P4 or PP, so I can't compare there,but Poser 5 isn't for everyone, that's certain. Reading the posts is helpful as it will help one decide if you should get it or not. Most of the problems being experienced with P5 seem to be OS or hardware related it. I recently upgraded to SR3 and added another 512 ram to a 1.7ghz PIV running XP Pro. I now have 1G of ram and it runs a lot smoother than it did previously. Xp does manage memory way better than W98. I can't imagine using P5 on a Windows 9x machine. Some have been able to make it work, but my guess is they are in the minority. P5 does demand a lot of resources. Consequently, I don't think CL should have recommended P5 be run on a machine that does not have XP or Windows 2000 or at anything less than 512 ram (256 would be an absolute minimum) I read those ridiculous minimum requirements on the box after I got it and installed it and laughed! I've also noticed that people with 3 ghz machines and the new HT systems and tons of ram are also seeing some issues. Poser 5 seems to run best on 1.5-2.8 ghz PIV machines with 1-2 G of ram, running XP Pro. Other issues that people have are related to some unresolved "bugs" or "limitations" in the program that have to do with lights, textures, etc. Those can be identified and "worked around" following some of the tips posted by Yaensen here and over at RDNA and Poser Pros.

As has already been mentioned in this thread, I hope that SR4 will address some of these problems.

"It is not just "p4 with some minor changes"." Xantor, I never said it was. If you're going to quote me, please be accurate. I said P5, "IS P4 with some very minor changes and a bunch of 3rd party apps tacked on..." And your statement: "Poser 5 has some great features, the cloth room is excellent, the materials are great and they are much more advanced than in p4 you can do reflections in renders and make a fur effect with the displacement mapping. The firefly renderer is very good too" contains some of the very 3rd party technology I was talking about. I don't "complain" about P5...I merely report my experiences with it and that of others when people ask. And if you're that sick about complaints anyway, I'd suggest you stay away from threads titled, "I am not very pleased with Poser 5." What did you think you'd find in this thread? Nothing but compliments and praise?

I don't know if I'd be considered a power user, but I find myself using PP less and less as time goes by. I just find it difficult and clunky to use, because I'm so used to P5 now. I use it once in awhile; it is faster. And it's convenient for importing stuff to Vue. (Don't have to worry about which runtime something's in, because there's only one!) But if it vanished tomorrow, I'd hardly miss it. It's probably been weeks since I last used it. And I've kept Poser 5 open and running for days on end, and haven't had a problem. There is a slight memory leak, but IME, it becomes a problem only if you do repeated renderings with very large textures. All in all, I've found P5 (under XP) to be pretty stable. Much more so that PP under Win98 was.

Would it be fair to say that most of the power-users of P5 still bounce back and forth between it and older versions? I don't know if fairness would be involved, but I still have both installed on my system, and use them both ... mainly to ensure backward-compatibility with my freebies.

I tried a similar scene with 6 scuba divers and the skimmer and it took a long time just to cancel the scene, it looks like it is just a memory problem (not enough). I use windows 98se and I have 128mb of memory, that used to be a lot of memory but nowadays it isn`t really enough, especially for 3d apps.

Purchase Vue, and render your scene in that.

I believe that you will find that your rendering problems will go away. Or, wait for SR4, and see what that does.

I've been using Poser since Version 1, and for most things, I still use Poser 4. Poser 5 has some great stuff in it, but I don't enjoy using the software. If CL would take the time to fix the following two issues alone, I'd probably retire Poser 4 and dance a jig in my office:

1. Keyboard shortcuts. Poser 5 does not play nice with Windows. In Version 5, CL somehow managed to bugger up the program's window hierarchy so that the parameter window's input events don't filter through the main application window anymore. Indeed, the parameter window almost behaves like it's a separate application, to the point of having its own button on the Windows taskbar sometimes. :-P As a consequence of all this, keystrokes are handled differently depending on whether the parameter window or the document window has focus, and many of the shortcuts just don't work if you're in the parameter window. No, you have to go and click in the document window first, being careful not to click on something and screw up your present selection. Then press the key again. You really notice this if you spend a lot of time tweaking pose dials while hopping between cameras. "Why isn't the view changing? Argh!" (click) ctrl-M, then mouse back to the dials. "Argh, that click selected a different part!" (click) Adjust a dial... "OK, let's see it in the posing camera." ctrl-, ... "ARGH!" (click) It didn't used to be this broken.

The programmers could have avoided this mess. I suppose CL will say it's a limitation of whatever busted cross-platform windowing toolkit they used for the implementation. I keep hoping that the Poser will behave more like a robust Windows application with each successive release, but Poser 5 was actually a step backward in this regard.

1. ABYSMALLY SLOW file operations. What the hell happened? I know that Poser files are large, but P4 can handle them a lot faster than P5 does. I can load an "all head morphs" injection pose very quickly in P4; the same operation in P5 goes on for minutes. Load a scene... same story. And then there's the occasional time that P5 just decides to hang after it has saved a file. Thank God the data appears to be all there, because when this happens, I have to kill P5 from the Task Manager and restart it.

Now... I am not an idiot and I am not running the software on some slow, underpowered system clogged with crappy utilities. Poser 5 is, bar none, the slowest, creakiest graphics application in my tool set. If Curious Labs would address the basic issues of efficiency and robustness, Poser 5 would be enormously more pleasant for me to use, other known bugs notwithstanding.

Another bad thing about poser 5 is that it uses a lot of memory, even when you aren`t doing much. Anthony another way to do a "composite" picture, render the skimmer and the three crew and the water, then use that picture as the background and render the three front figures seperately, though because they are in the water, you would have to do some postwork with a drawing program to fix the picture.

Play a rousing game of "How long until it crashes". Open P5, load some figures, start posing, and see how long it takes until it crashes. Prizes will be awarded to people who can keep it running longed than the currect record of 10 minutes."

What's my prize? My record so far is about 6 days. That's rendering and posing and scene creation about 11 hours a day for all six days. Then again since it didn't actually crash (I exited it cause I was done) I suppose that doesn't count.

• Poser 5 - $350
• Computer - $1,100
• Poser figures and props - $100
• Complaining endlessly on the internet about how bad your experience has been? Priceless.

"Cry about the fact that you paid $350 for piece of software that you won't use because it's so buggy and that the company won't take back even though it probably violates the implied warranty of being a usable product."

It's too bad the wont take it back since your system seems to be incapable of running it well. It is always unfortunate when someone can't get use out of something they paid for. But it sure isn't CL's fault that your system won't stay stable with this tool.

Poser 5 is stable for a lot of people. Would it be better if it was stable for everyone? Sure. But since it is as stable as Max and Maya I am fairly satisfied for the price.

You're upset? Fine. You want to be vocal about it? Go for it. But realize that this particular horse is losing steam as more and more people start to get over their initial upset and realize P5 is a capable, stable upgrade with some good features.

"I'll re-install my Poser 5 when Curious Labs brings up a downloadable upgrade that can run at least as many characters and props on stage as Poser 4 can, including under Windows 98."

There is simply no reason or method for companies to continue to try and add features and still support obsolete systems that are more than 5 years out of date.

I know that the speed of evolution in the computer field is confusing to some, but its a fact of life... and I don't want ANY company, CL included, to continually have to hold back their software to keep those who won't or can't upgrade happy.

Just like I stopped designing websites that worked in IE 1, or Netscape 3, or on 640x400 screens. The world moves on.

"I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's not the utter crap many purport it to be.""

Complaining about new software versions is a common Internet pastime. You see it in EVERY product. Each new version of Maya and Max there are a host of people complaining that features don't work, that stability sucks, that it is slow or bloated and refusing to upgrade.

It will never end, and there is no way to avoid it. Change is not something everyone enjoys... and when you couple that with the trend of people billeting what they want to believe about the "next version" there will always be upset and disappointment. This sort of complaint is not unique to Poser, or Curious Labs. Every upgrade of every tool ever released faces similar complaining.

Before SR3 there may have been some validity? Now? None really.

"it is time the Poser software source form was made public like the Gnu software is, so that many people can look at it in spare time and find and correct bugs and inefficiencies etc in it."

Because the answer to making a complex program better is to kill the company that develops it, let a billion programmers of varying skills and talents make changes to it that no one will really review and then expect us all to put the result on our machines? no thanks.

Only a very, very few programs that have been open sourced benefited from the process - and almost all of those had massive corporate backing and professional, full time development staffs. Open source Poser and it dies instantly as a tool with any future.

"Poser is not compatible with the closed-source, security-flawed Windows OS"

Really? I guess the fact that my Windows (and those of my clients) are secure, stable and fast and that the machines I run Poser on run it perfectly is an illusion :)

OS wars - the other type of internet zealotry :)

"I don't understand why people keep making excuses for poorly-written software."

Because in this case P5 is no more or less buggy than any other large, complex tool. Bugs of some degree are inevitable in large software - not package is immune to them no matter how much it costs. There is not a single P5 bug that causes me a moments problem during my work with it - not one.

However Poser 5 IS a tool that does tax a computer as much as Max does (for example) and while that may not be a good thing, it isn't a bug. A lot of people complain and moan about Max being buggy too - and most of the time it is old or out-dated hardware or software.

Poser 5 represents hundreds of thousands of lines of code that interacts with literally millions of lines of code from many other vendors (video drivers, operating system files, third part data files and so on). That there are, in all that interaction among all that code by all those people some complex and somewhat inconsistent interaction is inevitable.

And it always will be in complex systems.

Computers are deterministic and lend themselves absolutely to analysis by logic. However the number of factors involved in the proper functioning of large software systems is a variable count measured in the millions at some levels of detail.

"Why is it that only P5 requires a stripped machine?"

It doesn't. While it is a common diagnostic or suggestion for people to go through the normal "chicken dance" of antivirus and declutter ting and so on, the reality is that Poser 5 runs just fine on many machines with no special preparation at all.

I run Poser 5 alongside and at the same time as Max, Photoshop, Maya, Outlook, Dreamweaver  and Visual Studio constantly. I have NEVER had to defrag, de-crud or in any other way strip down or alter my machine for any of those programs, P5 included.

"Would it be fair to say that most of the power-users of P5 still bounce back and forth between it and older versions?"

No. Of those I know who are Poser "power users" that I know enough about to know the work habits stay in Poser 5 all the time. A vendor may go back to Poser 4 to check their products compatibility, but that is becoming less and less common and will fade away in the future as P4 eventually, finally, goes the way of the dodo.

"I can load an "all head morphs" injection pose very quickly in P4; the same operation in P5 goes on for minutes."

Have you copied the !DAZ folder to the P5 runtime? This is a known flaw with the Daz injection method used in V3 and M3. It's one of the problems with Daz deciding not to officially support P5.

A "All morphs injection" takes just under 30 seconds on my machine or less depending on what I am running other than P5.

"But since it is as stable as Max..." Excuse me, but I used to use Max and had nowhere near the trouble I have with P5. "realize that this particular horse is losing steam as more and more people start to get over their initial upset and realize P5 is a capable, stable upgrade with some good features. You're right...the "complaints" are dwindling. But it isn't because people are "getting over their initial upset." It's because fewer and fewer people are bothering to post their problems. They're tired of being called whiners and complainers and tired of arguing with brick walls. There are people who don't post here at all since the initial P5 release debacle. Maybe they gave up on Poser alltogether or just on Rosity. I know at least one who got banned for bashing P5. This is probably what the original CL crew hoped for...complacence over time. And it's happening. "There is simply no reason or method for companies to continue to try and add features and still support obsolete systems that are more than 5 years out of date." Is there a reason for a company to tell the truth? The P5 box says it will run under Windows 98 and ME. No user of either one should have to upgrade their OS to get P5 to work. "Because in this case P5 is no more or less buggy than any other large, complex tool." WHOA!!! Wrongo!!! Please refer to my post #32 in which I state: "Why then do many people having trouble with P5 don't experience problems with their other programs? In my case: Photoshop 6 & 7, Carrara 1.1, Vue4, Bryce4, Painter 7, MS Office XP Developer's Edition..." "Bugs of some degree are inevitable in large software" Maybe so but I hang around forums for many other software packages and have never seen the tide of complaints and problems like P5 has had. Not even close. Soulhuntre, it's obvious to me P5 works well for you and many others. But it should be just as obvious to you that it doesn't work very well for others. I worked in software and hardware installations and instructions for over 15 years and have never seen anything as bad as P5. Hell, even some of the people who worked with CL on P5 have decried what happened. Making excuses and blaming the user and/or his/her machine doesn't help get the problem fixed.

Poser 5 does work with windows 98, the biggest problem for me is that I don`t have enough memory to use it properly (128 megabytes).

"Excuse me, but I used to use Max and had nowhere near the trouble I have with P5."

That doesn't really change anything. Like P5 some peopel have huge problems with Max 6 for instance that had no problem with Max 5, Maya peopel have the same complaints. On most machines it works fine, on some it barely works at all with others falling in between. It is exactly equivlelent.

"Maybe so but I hang around forums for many other software packages and have never seen the tide of complaints and problems like P5 has had. Not even close"

I have, all the time :) It's a semi religious issue - go hit Slashdot sometime and see them complain about windows, office and anything else they dislike. You'd be amazed windows runs AT ALL after listening to them.

"Soulhuntre, it's obvious to me P5 works well for you and many others. But it should be just as obvious to you that it doesn't work very well for others. I worked in software and hardware installations and instructions for over 15 years and have never seen anything as bad as P5."

Then your experience is limited.

I have seen tools much more expensive than P5 that were much "worse", I have even seen machines where Max and Maya were much, much less stable than P5 is on the same machine. Life is like that. If your experience is as extensive as you claim then you must be aware that whether or not a machine can run "office" for instance is not a great diagnostic tool for a complex 3d application.

"Making excuses and blaming the user and/or his/her machine doesn't help get the problem fixed."

And making blanket, untrue statements that the software is universally problematic, buggy or unusable doesn't do it either. The reality is that on SOME machines P5 is horrible but on others is is just fine.

Just like most other complex software systems.

When someone says "I couldn't get P5 to run on my machine" I rarely if ever comment that they are wrong. When someone says "P5 doesn't run on my machine, therefore it is a defective piece of _____ that no one anywhere can ever use" I have to step in and correct their assertion.

BTW - I have no problem supporting the idea that CL should remove WinME and Win98 from the list and simply say that it "may" run on those systems. They are obsolete and no longer actively supported - they should simply die like the dinosaurs they are. Supporting them is a waste of time and resources for CL.

"Then your experience is limited." 15 years not enough? How about hundreds of machines, thousands of installations, unknown years as a programmer and writer and 4 years as an instructor? What is your experience? "And making blanket, untrue statements that the software is universally problematic, buggy or unusable doesn't do it either" I agree. I don't make "blanket, untrue statements." But you do. Here's an example just from this thread: "Because in this case P5 is no more or less buggy than any other large, complex tool" IMO, that is a blanket, VERY untrue statement. Again, please refer to my post #32 where I state: "Why then do many people having trouble with P5 don't experience problems with their other programs? In my case: Photoshop 6 & 7, Carrara 1.1, Vue4, Bryce4, Painter 7, MS Office XP Developer's Edition, various games, etc, etc, etc...?"