Forum: Poser Technical


Subject: objFile in spotlights... why?

_dodger opened this issue on Nov 20, 2002 ยท 16 posts


ToolmakerSteve posted Fri, 27 February 2004 at 11:38 PM

Thought I'd make one more comment on the "what is the obj line for": There are MANY places in the Poser file formats, where what is spit out is clearly a straight dump of the data format that the programmer (Larry) uses in memory. This is a dubious way to invent a file format, leading to redundant information, or ignored information. But, hey, it was a quick and dirty solution for Poser 1. "obj reference in spotlight" is simply another case of this Poser coding style. Hypothesis: Larry had a data format that has an obj field, because most entities need an obj. Silly for spotlight, which is hard-wired, but it is often easier for a programmer to use a common data structure for all objects. Dumping that raw data format out as the file format isn't exactly a "professional" solution, by today's standards. But it can be made to work. And it wasn't written by a cushy programming team, today. It was hacked out in pre-history by a lone programmer. And Thank God he did - as demonstrated by the fact that we're still using Poser many years later, despite all its deep flaws. Nothing better has come along yet (DAZ Studio still embryonic as I write this).