cyberscape opened this issue on Jan 19, 2005 ยท 76 posts
leather-guy posted Wed, 19 January 2005 at 3:07 PM
Whooo - I just spent way too long typing this, I hit refresh, and suddenly there's 11 responses ahead of me - obviously a subject close to our thoughts . . . G My thoughts; 1 Tiered library structure with independent drag-and-drop capabilities from separate and/or add-in file/asset browser utilities. Ability to keep several libraries open simultaneously and/or minimized as desired. Love to be able to keep 2 or 3 instances of something like P3d0 or Windows explorer open and drag-and-drop assets into a scene or apply a pose/MAT/MOR file to a selected element the same way. 2 A real status bar that tells the user what Poser's primary focus/process is in real-time. If 92% of Poser's resources are tied up searching for a particular texture, or interpreting a geometry, I'd like to see that at a glance. Coherent/relevant error messages and effective error-trapping would be an imperative. Meaningful progress bars would be a plus as well. 3 User-selectable front-ends/modes, such as "Newbie" with tons and tons of "what would you like to do now; A/B/C/..." wizards and popups (this could be an optional add-in for training beginners); Beginner, with lots of tool-tips and and prominent descriptive menus; Medium, for semi-proficient users; and Expert mode with most tools minimized, and lots of hot-keys and memory dot-type macro options. 4 Make Content Paradise a user-definable preference. Why insist on including an irrelevant option that seems to irritate so many? 5 In fact make all the rooms user-definable preferences. Why waste the resources and screen real-estate for operations that many users only use on certain occasions, or only play with once or twice in a blue moon? 6 Effective configurable levels of undoes would be a great boon. Perhaps something like a User preference for doing auto-saves periodically in the background to a temporary/session folder without overwriting any primary or existing PZ3's? I used to love the auto-save feature in WordPerfect when my primary use of a computer was word-processing. 7 Forget about new characters and such for now. Poser4/5 comes with a selection of assets to start with, and there's an incredible profusion of 3rd-party add-on characters and add-ins both free and commercial from all over. CL should concentrate on developing the Poser environment without diffusing their effort by trying to reinvent the wheel. No matter how great any additional included assets/characters might be, it won't please everyone, and the Poser community gets pretty strident when CL's efforts in that direction fails to support each and every user's pet projects in every way. Any efforts in that direction will be the virtual equivalent of passing out expensive custom-crafted bludgeons to be beaten with. (Anyone else recall the P5 animal fuss over one single remark in one thread by kupa?) . . . just my 2 cents worth, oposing views expected and encouraged . . .