galactron22 opened this issue on Jul 15, 2005 ยท 129 posts
svdl posted Sat, 16 July 2005 at 5:35 PM
Personally I think that both e-frontier and DAZ will stick to the .obj geometry format for a long time to come. I don't know if the .cr2/.pz2/etcetera formats are protected. I don't think so, 'cause if they are, most (if not all) merchants and freestuff providers are violating copyrights, and CL/E-frontier certainly would have done something about it. The tricky part is this: D|S can work with Poser content and Poser scenes - as long as they don't use P5/P6 specific options. Poser can not work with D|S content and D|S scenes, not even content/scenes that do not contain anything that's not present in P4. As long as D|S specific content has no distinct advantages over P4 content, merchants will not create D|S specific content - they'd cut out their Poser customer base, and no merchant in his right mind will do that. And even if D|S specific content HAS advantages over P4/PP, merchants will hesitate. We've seen this happen with P5 specific content: it took a long time and a lot of nagging by the community before merchants hesitantly started to make some (the freebie providers took the lead. Kudos to the freebie providers!). So what is going to happen? The most important point IMO is that D|S development started when the future of CL was threatened. Of course DAZ wanted to be sure that there was a program that could use DAZ content! Right now, Poser's future seems pretty bright. And the role of D|S has been degraded to that of a functional free demo - more functional than the Poser demos. If DAZ has been laying off D}S developers, it's probably because D|S development isn't as crucial to DAZ's continued existence as it seemed two years ago. What will DAZ do next? If they're smart, they'll bring Bryce up to date as soon as possible, and convert D|S to a Bryce plugin. That way, Bryce/D|S can be a low-cost alternative to Vue/Poser. Not as powerful, but not as pricey either. Or they could work on a decent Poser to Bryce workflow, like Vue already has. Maybe use the D|S base to create such a plugin. DAZ wouldn't hurt Poser/E-Frontier, but they certainly would become a strong Vue/e-on competitor. Time will tell.
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter