Quote - Would you consider making this app multi-platform, so us Linux users would finally be able to dump Poser althogether? Just a thought... and BTW, the Linux community IS growing!

Cross platform coding is a must as far as I'm concerned, there will be both native Linux and Windows versions available, and eventually perhaps Mac as well, the Mac version might be a bit slower coming as I don't currently own a mac and wasn't planning on purchasing one for a while yet.

The only problem with making it Mac compatible is that does slow down development somewhat, since most of the really good, easy to use GUI libraries haven't been ported to Mac yet. 

So at the moment I'm experimenting a bit to see what the best combination of libraries is going to be, then I'll figure out what platforms it will eventually support, but Linux and Windows are a must.

The app itself will be modular, so that you can plug in different sections as you go - which will also allow for it to be easly extensible.  I plan on giving it an internal render engine for it's own use, but I also hope to be able to connect it effectively to external render engines in the open source realm as well, giving the end user a wide vareity of engines they can use if they wish.

The native file format I'm leaning towards is just simple XML, though I've considered making the native file format for it collada as well, but I might just go with XML for it's own internal file format.   By using simple XML to describe files it makes it easy to edit and very transportable across networks, and it has a lot of other advantages as well.  I'll also give it the abiilty to zip and unzip files on the fly to conserve drive space if the user so chooses.

It will be able to read both Poser and Daz studio formats and make use of either.  I'll probably add in 3ds support as well, and write a really easy to use SDK for anyone wishing to add additional file importing or exporting capability.

Unlike poser it will have a database of files and where they are actually stored on the hard drive, and it will generate it's file lisitngs from this database - this allows you to quickly search or filter even across multiple runtimes for the specfic items you desire, even while using files stored in Posers native runtime structure.   By using this database structure it will be a lot easier for other external programs to be able to find files even if they are just stored in Poser's runtime directories and relatively referenced.  It also allows the program to have functions like integrity checking built in, as well as the ability to safely move or delete files listed in the database without risking the chance that you might delete a texture file that is referenced by another object that needs it.

Other than that I have a few ideas in mind, I need to do a bit more investigating to determine my best course for libraries, I'm even considering doing a full blown Java app so that it would run on any platform but the way things look at the moment my guess would be this will probably be a job for C++.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...