Hey quick question as I am searching for JCM threads :) I am planning on making a complex room, fully customizeable, and was wondering on light fixtures, and pipes and such as props that call the obj from teh geom folder rather then having them embedded. Will it help in the authoring envorinment if the obj's are ripped rather then embedded? Will the 10th light use the same instance of the obj that the 1st one uses or does it load a new obj into poser? The question stems from flash, where I can add a symbol into teh library and every instance of teh symbol in the resulting file will just use the same library file rather then loading in a new one.

I think they're instances. When I look into a PZ3, I see object references. Change the .OBJ file, and all instances in the scene will be changed too (on save/reload). But it doesn't matter. A prop or a figure is pure data, it doesn't have methods associated with it. And since Poser needs the geometry/mapping data to be able to display it, those will be loaded for every instance of your prop. So there is no advantage to be gained from using external .OBJs, at least not for the end user. It may have some advantages while developing your set; change the mapping of the .OBJ and all instances in the .PZ3 will reflect the updated mapping, for instance. Actually, the same goes for Flash. The data for every instance must be loaded, the methods are called from one single library. But a Flash symbol always contains methods, so using instances certainly has an advantage in Flash.

svdl, I've just started delving into Python callbacks and on the face of it, startup/callback python scripts associated with a figure might be considered as "methods", but I have not explored whether multiple python activated figures loaded from the same CR2 file would result in separate instantiations of the scripts unless that was specifically handled. Whenever I get a new prop or figure with embedded geometries, I like to extract them and use an obj reference as it makes CR2 and PZ3 files much smaller. I'm not so much concerned with disk space (or I'd use compressed files) as with having to wade through pages of vertex and poly information when I'm editing the file to add custom JCM. Being on a Mac, there are far fewer GUI tools available for manipulating morphs and JCM, so I've had to rely on understanding CR2 syntax and doing it all by hand. Tedious in the extreme, but crosstalk is just uncontrolled superconforming to me ;-)