I have a customer who is having trouble installing one of my problems on his MAC. I don't understand all the issues involved to help him personaly. I am asking that he post his particular question on this this thread under my post so we can help him with his problem. Not being a MAC user myself, I am curious to know my self what MAC users must do to use Rosity products. By the way, my product is a zip file that contains a runtime folder and several sub-folders, each containing the files that are needed. With PC, its a simple task of copying the runtime folder over to the poser folder. What do MAC users have to do? thank you marty

Tell him/her to go here http://www.soft-rabbit.com/ and go to the macutilities section and download the convertor and installer, every mac user i've worked with has found these to be just what they need ;o).....Thank goodness for MartinC ........Steve

Isn't there a problem with long names and MAC ?

files names have to be under 31 characters

Thank you Steveshanks! I have passed on the information by email along with an addy to this thread. Hope he joins in. hi compiler, funny to find you lurking here, lol. I am intersted in that issue also, compiler. I began limiting the length of the texture files after one MAC user complained. From what I know, the issue with long file names is only dealing with texture file names, and the length of their folder names, combined. I would be interested to know what the rules about long names myself. But, for the meantime, I am just keeping them short enough to work on MAC.

Poser was originally created for macinosh computers. These do not need resource files as the resource info is inside the so-called fork of the file. When Poser became available for Win-users, a solution had to be found for the fork-that-was-lacking. Hence Resource (.rsr) files. When a product comes with a .rsr ile, this info has to be implemented into the fork of the mac-file. That is the problem, and the solution was offered by steveshanks.

sexus, I have never made a file name anywhere near that long, but I had a couple complaints that poser installed on a MAC machine were not finding my texture files in a couple products. I had found that limiting the total length of the texture file address solved the problem. This meant shortening the length of my folder names as well as the the file name so the total length of the address in the cr2 or pz2 wasn't too long. marty

Yep. It is a pain in the butt. You have to make original names, but they can't be too long. --Rebekah--

Marty and all thanks. I am the notorious Mac user who is having problems. Thanks to Steve S I went over to the website and got the conversion utilities. I have my fingers crossed and hope that this goes smoothly. i can see from the other postings that there are a "few" Mac Os incompatibility problems. Oh well maybe I'll get a Pixar character named after me. Thanks again-Rich B

Good luck rbaker Just remember powerfull these forums are for solving problems. marty

There's a handy Merchant Utility in the freestuff - search for laetia. Version 1.2.4.1 was posted on 6th August. It checks filename lengths, and also the path structure for Mac compatibility. It's a PC only application, but if a Mac-less merchant (or freebie provider) uses it before uploading their wares, and the Mac user uses Maconvertor after downloading, all should be sweetness and light. :D

Out of literally thousands of products I've acquired over the years, only one managed not to respond to Maconverter. It's the best thing out there.

Hey everyone thanks for the help. It all converted and loaded, and i am as happy as a happy camper can be in this po-mo deconstructed post- apocalyptic new world millenium can be!

All software should be written as well as MacConverter/MacInstaller. Small footprint, apparently bullet-proof, exactly the right number of options (all the ones you actually might need), and really smart. Very few aps for any platform, for instance, offer the "replace, cancel, or create new name" option when saving over an old file -- with automatic suffix to boot.

Any chance there will be an Os X version of mac converter? Pretty soon I'll be getting my dual 2.5ghz G5 and really don't want to have to install classic to use poser. Poser is the only program that is keeping me from dropping 9 completely.

First, if there's a 31 character filename restriction in Poser 5, it's Poser, not the OS -- Mac OS X does not have that limit. (31 characters was awfully generous in 1984, and the confusion and headaches of increasing that just wouldn't have paid off... until the major architectural changes of Mac OS X.) Most any Windows Poser 5 or Poser Pro Pack package will work just fine with Mac OS X and Poser 5. Even "" delimited directory paths for textures seem to work in Poser, but I think it requires the standard convention that the file path is relative to the Poser directory. E.g. ":Runtime:textures:..." seems to work fine, or even ":Runtimeltextures". (The leading ":" seems to be a Poser convention even on Windows, which is curious.) The only file paths I've seen problems with are files with something like this one I just found on a search... "C:poser-runtimeRuntimetextures". (On the other hand, I'd be fairly surprised if that worked on a Windows system with the textures in the normal place. Not even getting into whether the Poser application directory is "Poser 4", "Poser 5", or what...) Windows .rsr files don't work in Mac Poser; but the PP/Poser 5 .png files are just fine. There's a program in the marketplace (which I haven't yet tried) that claims to convert .rsr files to .png on Mac OS X ("Poser 5 for Mac - Converter" by fmorgan); I've got it on my wishlist but haven't gotten around to buying it. It's only $5, though.) The remaining trouble spot is encoded geometries: RTE and PCF files. There's an RTEJava utility in Free Stuff that does the former. MacConverter handles PCF, but I haven't seen anything standalone; and rumor suggests that it doesn't support all Windows PCF files. On the other hand, encoded geometry files are fairly rare, and you just need to be a little cautious in evaluating the readme file. Nearly all packages are textures and morph channels, or full geometry. (There's a "Judy Plus" package, by some name I don't fully recall, that's RTE-encoded, but RTEjava worked fine on it.) I tend to still run MacConverter in Classic when I buy a Renderosity package that uses .rsr files. (And there are some .rsr files, particularly many of BATlabs', that MacConverter doesn't quite handle right... but even though the preview image may not appear the items work just fine.) If I get around to trying the rsr converter, and it actually works, I would no longer need Classic at all. (A PCF-encoded package would have to be awfully d***mned good to make me feel bad about passing it by just on that basis. ;-) ) Of course those still using Poser 4 are a different matter: it expects to find previews in Mac file resources, and you need MacConverter to put them there. You're definitely restricted to 31 characters under Mac OS 9 or Classic (funny, just a few years ago Windows people used to joke about how only Mac or UNIX wimps would ever want more than 8 characters in a file name... that's the circle of life for you.) And watch those file paths for textures, morph injections, and such: keep it relative to the poser application directory, and you should be fine.

If you don't already know, BlueBeard has drafted a guide to file formatting that should work smoothly across all systems and also allows for a little needed standardization between different merchants. http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?fileid=7953&key=508943

Softrabbit has a leater ver of Mac Converter that handles BatLabs file correctly now :-)

Well, looks like I'm quite late answering this, but anyway.. ;-) There is an installation tutorial for both PC and Mac users - you can always tell customers to go look there for info: http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=laetia&ViewArticle=9467 You can also drop by the Mac forum to ask questions. ;-) http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12404 'course my utility will help you make sure your product is fit for cross platform use, but I guess you know this by now. :-) And if all else fails, e-mail me. :-) I have the ability to verify products for you and I can answer just about any question you have. Caroline (laetia) MarketPlace Tester & Macintosh Forum Coordinator (basically, I'm the on-staff Mac support person) ;-)

Is that something like being the Maytag repairman? ^_^

I wish! The Maytag dude sits on his behind all day and reads the paper... LOL!

The Poser convention on filenames does seem to be a little bit Poser-specific, with the use of the :-character. My own observation as a PC user is that using a PC-style path can really mess things up, but there seem to be ways of getting a mix of the two styles into a Poser file. I've found the CorrectReference utility to be invaluable (see in the freestuff) for making sure that Runtime-relative paths are used. Looking at some of the stuff I've seen in Poser-saved files, I get the feeling that there is some really cruddy code buried in the program.

The thing that yanks me is that after I set the correct paths, load, make one tiny tweak and re-save -- all the paths become truncated. Of course the thumb is destroyed too, so it is back to BBedit and resEdit putting everything back the way it was...