Is it just me... but I find that... If I dial 999 on a telephone I get (eventually) the Emergency Services and not Pizzahut. If I set the dial on my alarm clock to go off at a certain time... then it will go off at that time... even if I then oversleep. If I set the dial on my cooker as per the cooking instructions, I end up with a half decent meal without eating charcoal or getting samonella. In fact.. every dial I use in real life and in every piece of computer software I have works exactly as one would expect it to work. Therefore... WTF don't the dials in P5 and P6 work properly..???? I have ranted about this in the past as being my most hated thing in Poser, but I get the impression that most P5 and P6 users aren't bothered by it or just live with it. I know I can type in the value that I need, but that is time consuming and should be unecessary. Why when the dials in pre P5 versions of Poser were rock steady do we have to put up with the 'slippage' in P5 and P6..? It's the only software I have that does it and it bugs the hell out of me. Thank goodness the Poser programmers were'nt involved in the current Space project. 'Okay... all systems go. Set the dials for the Space Station. Whoops..! We ended up Uranus..!'

The only Dial I use is the soap! I only use the Poser dials to get close to what I want then I edit the actual number til I get what suit's me. Lot's of work, but then I always just thought that that was Poser. "Lot's of Work".

Yes... lots of 'extra' unecessary work which slows down the real work we are trying to get on with in Poser.

Never turned the dials, Zig. I always type the numbers in. It's been a long time since I used P4 but even then I typed the numbers in.

I find it difficult to type with just one hand. The other one always seems to be busy holding bacon butties, cups of coffee, scratching my nuts and or/arse, picking my nose etc... not all at the same time, I must add.

You do wash the hand between arse and nose, don't you?

err.. mmmm... yes. Of course. I don't want to appear vulgar.

I always type values in, but I was shocked to see that P6 has this 'slippage'. Well, mildly shocked, knowing poser's peculiarities. And here was me thinking that the idea of software was that each version was an improvement over the previous one? mac

That's the problem. Poser doesn't work by 'improvement over the previous one'. They just keep heaping more duties and extra baggage onto the same old (archaic and outdated even) source code. It's sorta like taking the source code for NotePad and, building up from there, adding publishing-level functionality (typesetting, vector fonts, block arrangement, images, and so forth). The core of NotePad wasn't designed for desktop publishing. The core of Poser wasn't designed for multitasking, multiprocessing, high-level 3D graphics. Original features are slowly starting to break under the weight of massive geometries, thousands of morphs, and more demanding processing needs not built into the core. For instance, don't expect to see multiple undos until the Poser core is rewritten from the ground up.

Yeah I agree with you. What gets me. How come software companies can put out so many things with things wrong with them on sale. We wouldn't stand for a 3 legged table... tht would get the 4th leg with the first sR1 fix. We just wouldnt buy it or a car with an engine part missing. So why do we do it with software? It's our own fault and yep I'm guilty of it too, wanting the newest product now no matter what (Im a gadget freak)....and because of this the companies make their money doing the least possible. (very hungover lol so not spellchecking at this moment in time lol hell I'm surprised I can type)

It's called 'a captive market'. CL has had an effective monopoly on the 3d posing market up till now. Sure, you can pose figures in max and lightwave, but if you're not a business or can't justify the cost by selling content, who wants to shell out that sort of money? To be fair to CL, they're selling poser at a throwaway price, so complaints have to be tempered by the fact that we're getting our 3-legged table for next to nothing (relatively speaking). But if nothing else, you'd think they'd take some pride in their work and try and make the dratted thing work properly. I'm haunted by this feeling that CL themselves are battling with the 80s code in poser. As someone pointed out above, you can forget undos in it's current incarnation. But maybe now that they have a parent company with money, a code rewrite might be under consideration. Of course, that'll mean that about half the things we take for granted, like MATs, ERC and opening files in notepad will be history. Horrible as poser can be at times, it's immensely hackable. For that, I can forgive CL quite a lot. mac

The question about losing 'hacks' depends upon whether their exploitation is because of sloppy programming or fortuitous side-effects. If the former, yes, we're in for a rude awakening when all of these nearly essential hacks are nullified by a core rewrite. If the latter, updating the core code shouldn't nullify many of them. Personally, it appears to be a little of each, but mainly fortuitous side-effects. The Poser file parse is rather flexible, which allows for many of these offshoot type of Pose files and so on. On the other hand, if 'readScript' were removed or another new Master/Slave interface were enplaced for some reason, say bye-bye to Morph Injection/Removal and ERC.

If you want something scary, you should take a look at it's end user agreement, that you "sign" before you install just about any program. No one in the right mind would lease a car, or rent an apartment with the same conditions. "Should Microsoft Be Liable for Bugs in Its Products?" http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=40473 "Why Should Software be Licensed?" http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring05/cos491/writing/index.php?m=20050324

Kitten, actually people buy cars with engine parts missing all the time. That's why auto makers have recalls of 100,000 automobiles to replace the missing or defective part. And automobiles cost $20,000 to $40,000 or more instead of just $250 for Poser. My house had to have all new plumbing and roof shingles because the ones that came with it were defective. And the house cost $100,000. And look how many service updates Windows has, if we are just talking software.

Ziggie, you are so right about that! It worked fine in Poser 4, but 5 & 6 either stop one digit up or down. To get it to stop on zero, you either have to stop at -1 or +1. I usually end up having to double click on the damn dial and entering it manually--which also doesn't work as well as Poser 4 either. You have to select the numbers and re-enter them. In P4 it was already selected and you just entered the numbers.

'In P4 it was already selected and you just entered the numbers' Yep. And have you noticed the 'Preview Dimensions' dialog? The width field is highlighted, but when you TAB to the height field, it doesn't highlight, so your value goes in along with the previous one. I always bash in values without looking and end up with 600 x 600800. LOL. You'd think CL might notice these things when they use the program. Oh, silly me! Of course! They don't use it. They only sell it. mac