i have Poser8. The library browser is behaving inconsistently. have added Runtimes and sometimes only get "?" marks next to content folders. other times I get a number and full access to content. today p8 will not even list folders in any props library with or without a "?" However, if I do a search, it will find the Prop but the library tab still won't display the folders, the inconsistency is remarkable.

You're not the only one, your problem is exactly the same as mine.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2779519

Make sure you do a support ticket at Smith Micro so that they know that this issue has to be fixed.

Update to my ticket - The project team is "working on determining possible causes and a resolution to this issue".
Please make sure you also open a ticket as the more people that report it then the harder they will work to find a solution!
Time cost / energy cost / financial cost to making one or two refunds or actually paying people to fix the problem is a fine balance (which I understand).

Hmm just an idea but do you use Kaspersky's?

I'm reporting  a new ticket so that they know more people are having problems.  I'm sure they will get to it in the next patch.  I'm not as frustrated as it might seem because the search tab did find my files even though the main library browser did not. 

Let's start over figuring this out.

Purrdey, you said you even get [?] in the main runtime. Since everything is befuzzled, if you don't mind, I'd like to start simple.

Everybody else can follow along, too. We might find something.

Disconnect all external runtimes, so that Poser will just start with its own standard content.

Restart Poser.

What do you see?

diomede,

I believe there are bugs in the file scanner inside Poser that supports the GUI. The GUI makes calls via HTTP to a little servlet inside Poser. It makes different calls to populate the tree views, versus the search facility. The search engine is completely separate, so it is easily possible that it can see things the file scanner cannot.

Some of the bugs I've seen are with folder names and runtime names. The only one I've confirmed is when lkiilerich had the Danish word for hair. The word was "Hår" and apparently the file scanner does not encode this correctly in the XML. Some have claimed underscore ( _ ) in a runtime name is a problem, but I've not confirmed that one.

We've also seen items or folders entirely missing on Macs when a folder has more than 50 other folders or items in it. Not always, but sometimes. That bug is different, as the symptom is folders missing, not folders with [?].

It takes only a single mis-handling of a name to trash an entire category tree. So we want to start small and build up from there until we locate the problem.

Hmm OK I deleted them all, loaded it up and the P8 one was there. I added Poser 7 and Poser 6, all good. Now for my tidy folders... I renamed all the folders without spaces and have added 3 so far and all looks good. I've closed down Poser and restarted and they're all still working O.o

I have one huuuuuuuuge *ss runtime which was my first downloads runtime and before I started being tidy with individual ones, and because that's so big it's on my external drive. (I'm in the process of reinstalling everything to the tidy ones but it's a slow process so this is pretty much just a back up).  I have to get off to work now but I do wonder if that is the one it's barfing on, a. because it's so big and maybe b. cos it can't communicate with my external hard drive quickly enough.

I've got a long day today but will try adding that when I get home and see if it chokes up.

One thing I noticed with Kaspersky's, it had a couple of P8 icons on the lowrisk list - I moved them up to "trusted". I wonder if that had something to do with it.

I've started to remove my extra runtimes.  Just an FYI - P8 crashed when I confirmed to remove a runtime that started with a number (the createively named 2009 Runtime).  However, when I restarted P8, 2009 was appropriately gone.

Also, for me, the ? marks have appeared in one category of the library, especially props, at the same time that other categories of library seem normal.  Also, some folders within a category will seem normal while others have ? marks.

Now that I've removed all of the external runtimes, the P8 content folder does not have ? marks (some categories did before).  I did not uninstall/reinstall.

I will add external runtimes back one-by-one later today.

When I get the ? in my library, I usually just give Poser some time to find it.  I didn't have the issue until I started loading tons of content into Poser 8.  I just assume that Poser 8 was taking it's time to read stuff since after about a minute all of them had number in them.  This is a process that I can actually see happen.

Is this a bug? or Poser just reading?

Frederick
Poser By Design

ok, I reloaded my external runtimes.  I browsed each runtime library and category (figure, pose,...) after each load.  The ? all eventually turned to numbers and the content is available.  I don't know why the ? never turned before.  I once gave it 24 hours.  Maybe it had to do with something particular to whatever made P8 crash when I removed the library named 2009.  That library also works now that it has been reloaded.

I loaded up my over-bloated external runtime and P8 barfed on it so that does seem to be my issue. Gah I'm going to have to spend a few days getting everything finished reloaded into nice tidy folders.

One issue I have noticed though is that the remove library button doesn't do anything - I have tried only displaying that particular one and doing it then but it doesn't work. I edited the preference file and did it that way. Not really an issue because once the thing is set up I probably won't need to delete libraries much if at all.

I will wait a couple of days to make sure my problem is sorted before I close my ticket but I am very hopeful :) Now I can get on with learning all the nice new features and things!

Wow that was easy.

If you find something amiss, try narrowing down particular folder names, or runtime names. It would be good to find these, rather than have you just renaming stuff to get around it. We tried many funny characters. The characters space, underscore, numbers, vowels with accents, graves, umlauts, most all of these have been tested and working. Even some Japanese. But there could be exceptions or ones that are not consistently bad.

As to giant runtimes, We have a confirmed bug on the Mac, involving a folder containing hundreds of items, which is fixed in SR1. Nobody has confirmed this to be a problem on Windows, but it might be. The code is different in places, same in others.

The way we figured it out was to move everything out of a gigantic folder into a temp area, and Refreshed the folder. Then we moved subfolders back in chunks of ten at at a time, and refreshed. At 60 subfolders, it started to misbehave, causing some folders to disappear that were showing fine just a moment before.

Ok, glad to hear that there are issues present. I've been communicating with SM tech support over the last week about an issue with the library browser having a problem when a vendor inadvertently uploads a misnamed texture file reference. On my machine, even when I point it to the file it's supposed to be using, it refuses to accept that differently named file and continues to look for the one that the pz2 file refers to.  Tech support has had me try different things, but no luck. I have to either re-name the file to it's proper name within the browser search window that comes up, or Alt+Ctrl+Delete to shut Poser down. I know how to fix the vendor's boo boo, but sometimes you don't know it's there until you're halfway into a scene and then you have to lose your work in order to get P8 to behave!
Anyone else have a similar issue to this or know what might be causing it?

P8 clearly has some bugs loading mis-named textures, but that's nothing to do with the Library GUI. You can't even look at texture files in the GUI. That's why the GUI talks about "Library" and not "Runtime" because textures are in Runtime/Textures, not in Runtime/Libraries.

So I can't help with that, sorry. I have no visibility into the texture lookup components inside Poser.

Thanks Bill!
For me it's no biggie- I figure eventually it'll get sorted out...I don't use it for business, so I'm not overly concerned, just thought that someone might have a trick up their sleeve...
There's always "stuff" with the new versions... :o)

LOL not fixed after all. This is so random one minute it's OK next they're all gone again... going to have to wait until I get time over the weekend and do a whole clean install to another location.