"few more notches and you'll cut through to the barrel..." - Carolly

You carve notches on the grips, not the barrels. And gunslingers don't carve notches - we leave that to the movie lot gunfighter wannabes like you. > "So... what have YOU given the community?" - Carrolly

Quite a bit. And you? Nice to see you reaching so fast for the last refuge of the rhetorically incompetent. Drugstore gunslinger. > "You might not like happy hobbyists, but depriving a couple hundred thousand people of a tool just to feed your own ego seems terribly selfish to me." - Carrolly

You might not like people pointing out that CL looks to be repeating a number of the same behaviours they have in previous releases, but enabling them in that potential behavior at the potential expense of your fellow community members merely to feed your ego seems terribly pernicious to me. > "Larry gave us a reasonably comprehensive program for pennies... and it forced the bigger players to drop their prices." - Carolly

That's an interesting interpretation of the reasons the pro-end companies dropped their prices. And you are basing that on what, precisely? Larry also spent a number of posts in this forum and the Beta forum here last release accusing legetimate users with problems of warezing, rather than admit there might be problems. It took Kammerer finally badgering Cooper almost into a breakdown in Beta forum before Steve Cooper finally admitted in detail what the situations behind the release were. A conveniently deleted forum now, which is an excellent thing for the revisionist history afficianados like yourself. > "What I'm going to be interested in seeing is how many naysayers currently excercising their vast talents of prejudgement, if proven wrong by CL having a near flawless release of P6 (note the phrase near flawless." - DaleB

I haven't prejudged the software, Dale. It hasn't been released yet. However, the same can't be said for Carroly and a number of the others who are jumping rabidly at the throats of anyone who dares to state that CL doesn't exactly have a good track record over the past six years. They're making the same "prejuding" error that you're accusing the naysayers of: prejudging that it's going to be a truly wondrous thing. And having watched that company, Wienberg included, and it's past actions in regards to this community, the weight of evidence is strongly in favor of the pessimistic. Many of the same people are still managing the Poser end of the company even after e-Frontiers bought it, so insisting they've turned a new leaf is a bit premature. Wait and see. I don't have a real problem with Poser, nor with CL as it currently exists. Yet. I'll reserve judgement on that to see what the release looks like, and what the actual [non-Rendo forums] reviews say. I do have a problem with the rabid fanboys who seem to be taking it as a deeply personal affront whenever someone mentions the past history, and suggests that waiting might be a better plan. Or suggests that they're not going to buy the new version because they no longer trust CL after the previous one. The people who were burned in this before have a perfect right to express their opinions and histories with the previous release, and to point to links, and to suggest that people coming into this more recently might want to wait and see what happens before pulling out the credit cards. ANd to point out problems with the current pre-order. They have every much a right to do so as someone has to ignore that and pre-order it anyway. And they both have a right to do it without having the CL Suckup Brigade tar and feather them based on nothing except bile and wishful thinking. I'm not going to prejudge P6 at all, aside from what I see as well deserved skepticism. I will prejudge hell out of the poserites playing Judas Goat for their supposed friends and fellow community members. Gorra problem with that, mate? > "Actually Caly, it isn't on 'faith'. It's based on how the entire program -series- has performed." - DaleB

And so was Poser 4. I remember the unfixed buglists from that one that still weren't fixed several years after. I still have links to several of them. And PPP was a clusterfuck. And P5.... and there were quite a few people like John Hoagland who dug into the guts of P5 and figured out that many of the unaddressed bugs from P4 were still present. It's the same codebase. And Keohane's already stated back aways that they're not addressing the codebase in this version: it's going to be SR5.5, with some new 3rd party add-ons. Look up the "new features" yourself: they're all things that are incorporated into the current Pixels3D Tempest engine. Just hooks added, Tempest features incorporated, and switches enabled. No makey. Lets us hope tha tWienberg learned from the last experience and now has a handle on how to incorporate 3rd party features into his six year old code withoyt adding new breakage. He should by now. I hope it works. Just don't kid yourself that you're getting something new aside from the bolt-on toys and possibly a new SR. Comapnies already said what the case is. Buy it or don't buy it on that basis, but do it on a real appraisal, based on your knowledge of how Wienberg's coding's worked in the past, not on wishful thinking. > "P4's release was a bugfest as well...remember? All that's really changed in the dynamic is us, the users." - DaleB

And not much, or always for the better at that. ;) I recall that you were pretty hot on the Lynch CL bandwagon following Poser 5. I'd have to page through old links to verify, and I'm lazy atm, but we were in a lot of the same threads back then, no? > "However, we also know that CL's parent company was in the process of going under...and being owned, CL didn't have any choice in the release matter except to obey their bosses." - DaleB

So they've said. And all of the people who've said it were in the CL side of the equation - and the recently canned side too boot - not on the EGIsys side of it. The outright misrepresentations that many of them propogated on their customer base and later copped to renders them less then sterling sources on that. EGIsys makes an easy target for that, and there's no corroborating nor conflicting statements. Those people proved their word wasn't trustworthy on P5 - why should it be trustworthy on "who's fault it was"? So much for "not on faith, Caly". > " E-frontier is a very different animal, being on release 7 of a popular pro modellingrendering app, and having survived in one of the more brutal business environments in the world. CL has the support of a company that has the capitol and the technical expertise to actually be an active partner in the process." - DaleB

I agree. A problem with this is that they kept one of the key components to the previous fiascos.... that should give anyone with a memory longer than 2 weeks - to swipe Legume's infamous phrase - a bit of pause. Two of them, counting Keohane... however he seems to be missing from the current CL exec lineup. However, if P6 bombs, they can always blame Unka Larry. > "And you have to factor in exactly what was under the hood; P5 was a quantum leap over the 4 previous versions." - DaleB

I am factoring in exactly what was under the hood: Poser 4 code with 3rd party plugins. Hair, the dynamic cloth, the face room - none of that was a CL engineered innovation. It was all bought and plugged in. Again, go hunt up the antecedents of the "new" features. Shadow catching, ambient occulisions, subsurface scattering - all additions to the tempest engine and the Pixel's 3D app, not CL written. Bet on it. The quantum leap isn't coming from Weinberg or CL - he hasn't managed a quantum leap since Poser 2 to Poseer 3. ************************************ Pretty muchly, Dale, Carroly, we'll see. If Poser 6 is going to be worth the release price, then it will be in spite of the naysayers. If it isn't, then it won't be in spite of your hyperventilating over it. Curious Labs can handle their own PR. They don't need you to run interference for them. Hire on there as a PR flack, and be an honest whore. And get paid for it.

"I am a good person now and it feels... well, pretty much the same as I felt before (except that the headaches have gone away now that I'm not wearing control top pantyhose on my head anymore)"

• Monkeysmell