Hi, I wanted to post a note about the problem some of you have experienced within the depth map shadow following SR4. Our development team has been actively working on the fix for this which is close to final state. I should have more details and the expected date of release soon. With kind regards, Katherine

Great!

Thanks for letting us know.

Thank you very much!

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... and the peasents rejoiced. :)

Good news at last. This would have been a killer for me on SR4. Still waiting for the German version...

So there's going to be a SR 4.1? Well it's good news anyway :o)

Excellent news. Hopefully Jeff01's "work-around" has been a significant clue in finding the problem.

Euw. I first read "DEATH map shadow". :-)

PLEASE hurry with this. The SR has crippled the rendering engine instead of making it better, and I can't get the quality and speed I had. I'm having to do everything with raytracing, and it's not as soft a look as I want.

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Thanks Katherine! Jeff01's "workaround" is working for me now, but the fix would be the best!

DaveBookMark

Please do something about that connecting to the Internet also. P5 is installed on my work PC which is not connected to the net, and will never be. I have no network installed either, and my serial is not on the black list either. So no need for paranoia.

Will any other bugs be fixed or is it just the depth map?

Has sr4 INTRODUCED any other bugs? Or a tleast failed to correct anything it's listed as correcting? Enquiring minds want to know!

Hi who3D,

The Depth Map Shadow was an issue that came about for a small group with special set up circumstances (not an issue experienced by the majority using SR4). In fact, the standard testing environments did not reproduce this issue. Working with external input with exact details on how the environment Poser was experiencing this problem, allowed our dev. team to reproduce the issue successfully. Now the fix is in test verification to make sure it does not cause any new problems as any fix has the potential to do - but so far it looks good. Again, the date of this fix will be available soon.

On other problems introduced by SR4, this has been the only issue that was verified to be introduced by SR4. Understood that some have some technical issues they are working (or will work) out with our TS department, much of which is fixed by conducting a clean install. But outside of this Depth Map Shadow issue, no other bugs or problems are specifically related to SR4. Of course like any software or software fix, if further use brings up any issue that can be successfully reproduced and verified to be specific to SR4, we'll update everyone.

I hope this information helps some.

Kind regards,
Katherine

Out of curiosity Could you share with us what the "special set up circumstances" were/are?

Hi Tyger purr, I wouldn't be the best person to answer this question. But if you contact our technical support - they would be better suited to talk more with you on this. Kind regards, Katherine

Odd that "special set up circumstances" are involved. A clean install followed by figure update followed by sr4 still producd the same depth map problem for me :( Maybe we need to start a "Clean set up" from later than the original CD's (I have CD's of the original version, maybe a clean install from SR2 or SR3 CD's - if such exist - patch to SR4 better?) I was trying to suggest, in the post above, that based on Curious Labs' previous statement SR4 "is it" as far as bug fixes goes. Obviosuly correcting a problem such as that which SR4 introduced with depth map shadows would tend to lead to a minor fix, but I wouldn't EXPECT them to be fixing anything not introduced by SR4 until Poser 6 (which will no doubt be really, really cheap to upgrade to from Poser 5). Cheers, Cliff Cheers, Cliff

I will make contact. I was thinking that, if i should need future technical support it might be advantageous to identify myself as having these "special set up circumstances". Thank you.

Well Cliff, I think they need to make money again. Poser5 certainly wasn't a big success. Selling only a small number of a quite bugy piece of software at first and then working hard on major Service Releases (which costs significant amount of money) to get more satisfied customers. Finally they sold Poser5 quite cheap to get a decent user base. CL certainly didn't get rich with Poser5 and they have only costs with Service Releases. They need to sell something like Poser6. They should be aware though that customers will be very careful about buying the next Poser Release. Stability is the most important feature of Poser6.

Yes poser 4 didn`t have many bugs and nothing major, CL should take as long as they need to get poser 6 right and with no major bugs.

I would sure like to know what that "special set up circumstances" is myself. I did a complete clean install too and still have the problem.

"Yes poser 4 didn`t have many bugs and nothing major, ..." Come again? lol Crosstalk is a bug in P4 that was used successfully to create a whole new group of features. It was fixed in P5, and lots of folks whine about that. P4 crashes when it can't find a file that was referenced poorly by the package maker or was moved by the user to a new location. I agree -- P5 was buggy in it's first release, and both P4 and P5 are pretty cool apps, and P6 needs to be stable, durable, and well thought out. But I remember the release of P4. And ProPack, as well. Both required service packs, and the people who bought them were just as wicked abut P4 as they are about P5 now. But to say P4 wasn't that buggy? lol. Maybe on a comparative level... Special situations typical means hardware, software, ans sysem settings that are unusual in combination. THis happens actually a whole heck of a lot more often than folks realize for the most part, and usually affects a very, very small percentage of users. With drivers, hardware, software, and so forth all interacting across several differenet platforms, the fact that things work at all is still pretty incredible when you consider that some hardware vendors out there still refuse to use the API's or to submit their drivers through the god awful slow WHQL process for windows.

There are no MAJOR poser 4 bugs, there are a few minor ones. I have never had poser 4 or 4 with propack crash because it couldn`t find a texture, maybe I have been lucky...

Ok , I heard back from tech support. There response was quite prompt, I am delayed in posting here.

According to tech support [t]he problem has to do with what seems to be Poser's random selection of a working directory to place the shadow map temp files and it can be made to repeat on any system

Now this appears to be a bit incosistant with Katherine's previous statement of "special set up circumstances" However, in her defence (because I have seen how quick people around here are to cry foul), when I asked she has clearly stated that she is not the best person to answer this question, and given that the problem is not occuring on all machines (even though it could), I belive the explination most likely given to her could easily have been interprited as being caused by "special set up circumstances" and as ynsaen has stated, this could be the setup of your computer (as in, things other than Poser). Thus I find no fault on her part.

I would like to thank Katherine taking the time to come here and communicat with us and I hope you return often with good news.

Both are right, the statements are consistent. The problem is created by a combination of an erroneously limited path length for the shadow map temp files and from a sometimes less than optimal placement of those files. If your installation happens to be in a place with a long path name, it is rare, but not completely unlikely to hit the problem. Or, if your scene file is loaded from a location with a long name, is again possible to hit the problem. Most users stay within the limit, so they'll never see the problem. Some exceed the limit, and their shadow maps are gone.

uli k. So what you are saying, the defalt installation's path is to long? That is what I used and I have the problem.

When I install any program I usually take the company name out of the install path. As well as using one less drawer, it also makes it easier to find the program again.

I used the default inststallation path too (C:Program FilesCurious LabsPoser 5). The main docunment I've been working on during this was in: My Documentscnd1ver3 Which doesn't seem terribly long to me. If we expand that to the REAL filename (Which is what most programs store) then we get: C:Documents and Settings[logon name]My Documentscnd1ver3 Which still, I have to say, at under 80 characters is not that long and IMHO it ought to be considered that people might put their Poser documents in subfolders of their "My Documents" folder. I'm somewhat bemused how changing the internal name of the lights (actually lenghening them in the process) would affect an issue caused by too long a path name, but I'm glad we have clever chaps like Jeff to figure these things out for us (or I'd still be on sr3 for sure). Normally I'd attempt some humour here, but there's a fine line between humour and poor taste which I'd rather not mistakenly cross. Cheers, Cliff

PS naturally, I have not heard back from Technical Support at all.

I've discovered that with the new SR, I can't change the background color anymore, either. This is absurd - I should have left well enough alone.

Was the tip in the readme for SR4 no help in setting up background colours? There's a general rule of thumb "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" that I sometimes wish applied to Poser (4 or 5) . Cheers, Cliff

I glanced over the read-me, and didn't see anything about background colors. All I can tell you is that the button didn't work anymore. I re-installed P5 and went back to SR3 and everything works again (as well as it did). This does NOT instill confidence in spending money for P6.

Ok, I found the part in the read-me, but I never had this problem under SR3 - it wasn't until SR4 that it happened, when it was supposedly fixed. I guess my default document must have been a problem file also. What a mess.

ynsaen - yes that crosstalk thing - I really, really would like to see a button in P6 that said 'Crosstalk On' with a checkbox next to it. That would be soooo cool. Crosstalk was the bane of working with multiple figures in P4, I hated it. But now that the Milfigs actually USE it contructively, I long to get it back lol! Well, sometimes at least. :] Fish

if an sr requires a clean install, why not say so on the web site? Many of us believed CLabs when they said SR3 did not require a clean install when for many, it did.

I hope that SR4.1 solves the problem that some of us were having with the extra long launch and relauch times for Poser 5, even after doing a clean install. I'm back on SR3 for the time being.