Quote - > Quote - How far back do you realistically expect them to go? Back to Poser 4? 3? How far? Poser 4 is over 12 years old...

More to the point, Poser 5, which made the shift to png for thumbnails, was released 8 years ago.  Given that we had 4 versions and six years to convert rsr files before the format was finally made obsolete and support stopped, with some of those versions available for free for sometime now, and with multiple free conversion options available besides Poser...well, at what point do you say "deal with it"?

DAZ, the biggest Poser content provider, only stopped releasing RSR-only files four years ago. It's not exactly ancient history. People have provided freeware converters, so it's not the most difficult programming in the world--and Poser already had it in the previous versions. With my having half a terabyte of Poser content, of which roughly half of that is in RSR formats, there's better things to do with one's time than to manually convert tens of thousands of files. I only install the content I need when I need it--which makes the batch RSR conversion programs impractical because I'll have to run the program every time I install content. The point of computers is to assume the manual tasks that are impractical to do.

This isn't an issue of supporting obsolete things, but maintaining support for things that aren't. I'd guess that there are somewhere between 5000-10,000 Poser items that have no PNG thumbnails. Much of the content for V3/M3/A3/S3/D3 figures has no PNGs. Those are not obsolete figures or content. This isn't asking support for 12-year old items, but for things that were only released 3 years before Poser 8 was released. I can understand people, who have little content beyond the Millenium 4 releases, but it's odd for longtime Poser users to be so accepting.

As an aside, there is an interesting attitude I've seen nowadays--it's the willingness to accept things that aren't right. It's not just accepting them, but arguing to accept them. I remember questioning the terms of service at TriggerStreet.com a few years ago, a site that provides a forum to help discover budding screenwriters. The site has a common licensing arrangement that grants a nonexclusive license to the site to every screenplay put on the site--including the right to sell those works. I was rather amazed at the number of people that defended that licensing arrangement instead of wanting a better one that would protect both TriggerStreet and the writers using the site. Some of the posts were even insulting. I wasn't condemning the site, but just asking them to fix the licensing terms so that they weren't so ridiculously one-sided.

Quote - I would say that your concern with rsr shouldn't be the major issue.  You will get older content which are Material Room wired differently which can cause overall problems in the current iterations Poser.

Is that a problem with P8 not supporting P5-P7 MatRoom files well or older P4 and earlier content? If it's the latter, I'm not concerned because P4 textures were either associated with the OBJ file and other textures had to be manually installed. Content providers quickly switched to P5 compatible textures. They weren't so quick with dropping RSR thumbs because Poser automatically converted them whenever an item was opened. If it's the former issue of not being fully compatible with P5-P7, then I probably will not be buying any future versions of Poser and might return P8 for a refund.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon