Quote - If Poser Pro is not a high end app("by any stretch of the imagination") then why did they call it Poser Pro? If what's being said is true then it's a low end app being called Pro and that seems like more of a marketing strategy than actually being a Pro device.

I think so, yes. Or perhaps it's as 'pro' as they could make it under their new masters. I wonder what all eF had planned for PPro and how much had to be cut away in the end...

Quote - Finally what is it going to take for Poser to be considered everywhere as a high end app and join the club? I have a few ideas myself, but I'll let somebody more qualified tell us what needs to be done to reach that statues of "Poser High End".

If you want a pro wishlist then this is some of mine:

1. Plugin SDK with access to most parts of the poser architecture.

2. Support for sl so we can write and use custom shaders.

3. Multithreading of the cloth and hair rooms.

4. Support for advanced OpenGL/DX features including Cg and HLSL so that people can actually make good use of their fancy GPUs.

5. Support for more then 4 threads.

Note that none of those are flashy, 'wow, that's so pro !' features but rather tools which would go towards fixing the basic problems of poser. If we have a plugin SDK, then people can make (and sell) plugins that fix poser's joint system, it's UI, add native particles or anything else they can think of. If we have support for sl, we can make firefly 100x better then what it is like now. Multithreading the cloth and hair is also something that needs to be done if we ever want dynamic content to become popular. Cg and realtime shader support would mean that hardware rendering of poser scenes would become a great alternative for people doing anims.