I've had my renders stall out frequently over the years - especially on Poser 4 Pro Pack when i would add to many textures and characters and flood memory. I would see all sorts of odd rendering artifacts as well.  I am just now starting to experience some render stalls on my current machine under Poser 7 Pro, but it is only a single core Celeron 2.66ghz with 3.5gb of ram - ideally I want to upgrade to a multicore that supports up at least 24gb of ram at some point (long way off for now).  My two render nodes cope much better when sending things out through queue, but there are numerous reasons for this: They are both quad core machines, they are both 64 bit, they both have 4gb of ram, the queue manager FFrender uses far less system resources than a full poser application.  One of the things that may increase render efficiency for some is rendering to a seperate process, another is to reduce pixel sampling for things such as Depth of Field, and lastly reducing Raytrace Bounces.  Having to many lights with too much memory allocated for shadow maps will also kill a render (and I strongly recommend that if you have shadows turned off for a light to also set it's shadow map size to 0, otherwise the resources are still allocated, but go unused).  Sometimes my copy of Poser will just up and crash for no real discernable reason.  Not just during a render, but when accessing the material room, or opening the library, or moving a camera sometimes.  SM insists this is a Windows issue, I'm not convinced (Lightwave does not do this, nor does Carrara).

I have had my differences with SM tech support too. I have had several issues go unsolved, and get marked solved because they grew tired of trying to find the issue.  That irks me to no end.  On the other hand, on some issues they have worked with me extensively to try to get it working.  I really hate it when they insist the problem is content, or just as bad their standardized answer of "Your Poser Configuration Files have become corrupt and you need to delete them". Usually neither one of those is the real problem in my experience. Still, I have had far worse experiences with Tech support from another company, one which I currently own a piece of software from I can't even use as it keeps crashing (installed and tried on 4 computers, does it on all 4) and their attitude is that it's not their problem - I'll need to troubleshoot it myself.  Now, with issues on other products in these last months, they aren;t even responding to my tech support requests.  Given how many thousands I have spent with them, I really have not filed many either - it really is annoying.  So I put SM somehwere in the mid range.

I've never used Poser 8, so I am not sure of it's particular failings. I have 2010 Pro but do not use it a lot yet, I hate the interface on it and the library (I would rather see a native library more like the ACB Advance Library).  I also feel it would be great if in their next revision Poser were to incorporate a segmented render, similar to what lightwave can do, for low memory or resource heavy scenes, and I would love for them to incorporate a larger procedural texture node database, and some simple Post Processing effects (Lens Flares anyone?).  I would trade all that though for stability.

As for the best and most stable language to program the next poser in, what's all this talk about Fortran, Kobol, PL/I, C++... there is only one supreme programing language - Basic! Like the good ol' days of the C64!  Incorporate the latest support for Ansi acceleration cards! :P

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