mouser opened this issue on Jun 13, 2004 ยท 34 posts
Dale B posted Mon, 14 June 2004 at 6:14 AM
Like the character list and body part list for the active character at the bottom of the main scene window? Those are just standard Windows pop-up style menu's, gray color and all. I quit the hunt-a-part in the main window awhile ago. And I side with ynsaen in regards to OpenGL. The =only= thing it would do is provide real time rendering of light sources and transparencies in the workspace window...and possibly screen refresh acceleration on the actual interface. While it would be nice, the hard truth is that OpenGL is in a constant state of flux, what with the addition of all the nifty new shader effects for games (and most of the people here use gaming cards, not pro level boards). Driver roulette is not fun (I point to Vue 4 and Nvidia drivers. VuePro works much nicer, but then it also has a totally different OpenGL implementation than Vue basic; and once you commit to a specific version of GL you are stuck with it, just like Direct X). Ethesis; That's one of the major points that always grind my particular gears; how 'easy' it is to fix all this. It isn't. As I've pointed out in the past, the P5 executable is 10.8 megabytes in size. That is 11,075,584 individual bytes of =compiled= code (compared to the E-book 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix', which tips up at a grand 675k; and that is simple text with a touch of formatting. Stack 22 of the newest Potter books one on the other, and you have a rough idea of the size of the Poser executable if you printed it out. And that is in compiled form only....). God and CL only knows just how large the actual source files are, what -can not- be touched due to Poser's cross platorm nature, and what they may be contractually prohibited from changing (most of the required code changes to 'fix' some pet peeves would probably trash most or all of the hacks that have been taken to heart in Poserdom. ERC is a hack, f'r instance). Poser does need work; so does every other program out there. Computing these days is a matter of compromise, due to the intrusive nature of OS's in general. In days of old, when DOS was bold, a program could be designed to access the metal directly, and ignore most of the OS. Then you were only dealing with the hardware, and if you had hardware that met specs, no problemo. Not today. And not for any platform. I might trade the GI in for an expansion of the library system, that allowed me to create new categories to shove things like REMs and INJs into their own little corner. Better memory management would be nice...and using that to add a couple more levels of undo. Curious Labs has a mostly new team, now, and an owner who has an established record for writing graphics apps. I'm willing to judge the product to be, not prejudge it against the past since those conditions have changed rather radically.