I suggest you look up the definition of animosity then. I've seen it from at least 4 different posters posting with resentment and hostility aimed at the OP.

Definition of ANIMOSITY: 'ill will' or resentment tending toward active hostility  : an antagonistic attitude

If people resent their workarounds not being acceptable and display anger about it, they're showing animosity.

I've already said I don't think the RSR thing is a big issue, but I do think SM is aware of the issue because they've received enough complaints about it that it was considered being put back in as Ratscloset has stated. Do the work arounds take a lot of time? Not really. Do they take more time than having it done automatically by Poser/DS/Cararra when they open the folder with the RSR? Sure. Certainly it's not a lot more time, but cumulatively, for people who install/uninstall/reinstall repeatedly as has been suggested by the OP, it's still time wasted. Maybe it isn't enough to bother you or me but maybe busy people might have more of an issue with it than we do. Walk a mile in the other person's shoe? It's still good advice.

Software upgrades routinely abandon old, inefficient, unnecessary and unpopular features all the time. Still there will be those who's work-flow depends in some way on those features and who will be inconvenienced. The option of keeping these features around leads to bloat in the code, slower performance, bloat in the interface and confusion to the user.

As already mentioned, there are free, third party products that will do the conversions automatically for you.

<self-appointed moderator>
Having said that, I will agree that the comments suggesting that if you don't like it to get a refund were indeed snarky. Criticism of a software product is important to the publisher and to the users. I say keep it coming.
</self-appointed moderator>

One final thought. Gagnonrich mentiones that vendors are still selling content with rsrs. I agree that if you buy something that has critical features that essentially no longer work, you should at least be given a warning.

just like to qualify. at no time was I hostile or snarky. whatever anyone read into the words I published.

I gave up because the discussion was going no where. but if you read me as being Snarky, I explained and if you still think I was, thats your own interpretation and in error.

but I will say this. if anyone thought this was hostile, snarky or even a flamewar, you have no idea what the real world is like. this wasn't even close.

ah, life is hard kid so I'm doing you a favor by knocking you around - except I'm not knocking you around until I say I am. convenient.

Quote - ah, life is hard kid so I'm doing you a favor by knocking you around - except I'm not knocking you around until I say I am. convenient.

could you not be snarky please?

..see. you were not being snarky at all. yet, I applied the same logic, therefore you are being snarky.

so. lets all just stop accusing everyone of being snarky and hostile for a change.

Quote -
One final thought. Gagnonrich mentiones that vendors are still selling content with rsrs. I agree that if you buy something that has critical features that essentially no longer work, you should at least be given a warning.

Total agreement. A lot of us who have been long time users are well aware of the work arounds and some probably even were using them before Poser 8 was born. Put yourself in the following example though.

New Poser User buys Poser 8 or Pro 2010, then pays a boatload of money for content that only has RSR's. Without proper documentation in either the Software or Content explaining why some content images won't show properly in the library, this user is left up the proverbial creek without a paddle wondering why his purchases aren't working as expected. Oldtimers like us all know, hey, you've got a question ask in the forums at Rendo, DAZ or RDNA, but someone new who may not even know these sites exist is out in the cold with just Google. It's a pretty piss poor place for finding help if you don't know the right questions to ask.

For those who do find the forums and get the answer, "Use workaround A, B or C", they then have to find those solutions if the answer didn't include a link. They then have to download and install said answer and then they must learn how to use said workaround.

Now tell me again that time was not wasted that could have been spent using the product they purchased. Again, once workarounds are installed and learned they don't take massive time to use, but really, put yourself in the shoes of someone else here. New software is hard enough to learn without this sort of added roadblock.

People keep saying things like "it's probably too hard to implement in the coding", or "it'll bloat the software". As has already been mentioned, loading a file like an RSR an converting to PNG only takes a few simple lines of code to (1)recognise that the files are there, (2)verify that corresponding PNG's don't exist, if they don't then (3)load them, (4)strip the old headers and (5)replace them with PNG headers and (6)rewrite them as PNG files. Seriously, this is not a huge problem to be surmounted by even novice programmers.

Quote - As has already been mentioned, loading a file like an RSR an converting to PNG only takes a few simple lines of code to (1)recognise that the files are there, (2)verify that corresponding PNG's don't exist, if they don't then (3)load them, (4)strip the old headers and (5)replace them with PNG headers and (6)rewrite them as PNG files. Seriously, this is not a huge problem to be surmounted by even novice programmers.

You obviously haven't written an RSR reader*. I'll observe (again) that as they removed the code implementing this, it seems highly unlikely it will be put back in.

A second observation would be that the only reason content makers have been including RSRs is to support P4, and to do so they've had to convert the PNG thumbs created by Poser to RSRs (and in the case of some brokerages not include the PNGs until a few years ago so unnecessarily perpetuating the problem).

*And to save you the trouble of asking, I have.

Quote - New Poser User buys Poser 8 or Pro 2010, then pays a boatload of money for content that only has RSR's. Without proper documentation in either the Software or Content explaining why some content images won't show properly in the library, this user is left up the proverbial creek without a paddle wondering why his purchases aren't working as expected.

Even seasoned Poser users can have a problem. In the original post I linked above, that made me decide to ask the question, the poster has been a Renderosity member for a decade. Poser 8 has been around for over a year and users are still finding themselves frustrated by missing thumbnails. The odds are that they wasted a lot of time trying to troubleshoot the problem before coming here to get a solution.

I wonder, in your example, if the new user would complain to DAZ tech support instead of SmithMicro since that's where they bought the content. It would be hilarious if DAZ support told the customer that the file won't open correctly in Poser 8 because SM stopped supporting the thumbnail format they developed. They could advise the customer to download the free DAZ Studio and open the files in DS to get the thumbs and--by the way--the free program will do most  of the things they wanted to do with the $250 software they just bought.

Workarounds are solutions to fix products that didn't do what customers expected. How many workarounds does anybody have for things Photoshop doesn't do well?

Unlike most software, today's Poser is not a standalone product (Poser 1 and 2 were). Poser has negligible capabilities to create new content and relies on additional products to provide more figures, clothing, and environments to create the illustrations users want. That reliance on external content, nearly all by third party vendors, makes it all the more important for Poser to maintain at least the compatibility levels it had in the past.

Why does anybody even care how much code it would take to restore RSR support? That's SM's problem. How easy it is to incorporate depends on the level of effort, whether there's a ready contract in place to handle doing new work not in the original P8 spec, and a variety of other considerations. That has no bearing on what we want to see--it only bears on the probability of it happening.

Quote - I'll observe (again) that as they removed the code implementing this, it seems highly unlikely it will be put back in.

It wasn't so much removed as not required to be added when the new library was coded from scratch. Whether that was deliberate, an oversight, a lack of awareness of the amount of content that is still available that's only RSR, or something else; who knows? Ratscloset said it was a Feature Request at SM, so there's a chance it might be brought back versus making a statement that there are no plans to include it.

You're right that RSR compatibility with P4 continued their existence long past when they should have been dropped. Since all versions of Poser, till P8, could do RSR thumbs, it was easier to only include RSRs in files to keep filesizes down. That's why we're stuck today with thousands of readily available files that don't have PNGs and won't natively show thumbnails in the latest versions of Poser.

I think Steve's referring to the additional code to incorporate the existing P7 RSR conversion routine to P8. Since you've made your own converter, how much effort do you think it would be to add it to P8?

The rsr issue is really part of a larger problem having to do with Poser's absence of standards for third party products. I'd like to see Poser take the approach that MicroSoft did during the early days of Windows.

During the days of DOS and earlier, application developers could use any look and feel they wanted and have their product behave any way they wanted. When Windows came along, MS said to developers that if you wanted to use the Windows logo on your packaging or call your product "Windows compatible" your product had to meet certain standards. These standards controled the overlook and feel, the behavior of the mouse and keyboard, and lots of internal, technical stuff.

Poser needs to do the same thing. They need to come up with a "P8 compatible" logo that vendors can assign to their products if and only if those products meet certain criteria such as (off the top of my head):

• Use pngs instead of rsr files.
• All produsct should come with a ReadMe and that ReadMe should contain specific information including the file list. There should also be a specific naming convention that the ReadMe follows.
• Content should go in folders where ordinary users would expect to find it. Hair, for example, should go in the Hair folder, not in Character or Pose or any of those other places where Hair shows up.
• Those character specific morph injection folders (or whatever they are) need to have their own place in the directory structure.
• ...etc.

SM can add to or delete from this list as they feel, and I wouldn't mind. I'm not that concerned about WHICH standards they have as long as they have SOME standards.

I suspect that Microsoft required a payment to test products for compatibility. You're sort of getting your suggestion through stores that do a quick check that content works correctly. The best developers go through a quick playtesting process by letting a few people try out their product before marketing them. Don't forget that DAZ studio also has a large following and can have a different installation path.

Most commercial products meet your requirements. PNGs are in all newer products because any item saved to a libary (Poser 5 or later) generates a PNG thumbnail. Developers had to do extra work to save an RSR thumb to maintain compatibility with Poser 4. You're stuck with older products that only provided RSRs unless a store wants to repackage everything into new installers (not likely to happen). Commercial items provide readmes that typically will state at a minimum the store license and locations of files (though may not provide much info on how to use the product).

Freebies are a mixed bag for the simple reason that people are donating something for nothing. For the most part, even freebies do a decent job of providing a good installation. When they don't, it's hard to complain (though I've seen posts by freebie providers that are sick and tired of the number of complaints they do sometimes get).

What you'll probably find as you install more and more content into Poser is that you've got to rearrange everything anyway even if installations are good. You'll want to group like items together where they usually get installed in a seller's named directory. Unless you decide, for instance, to group all swords together, you'll have to otherwise try to remember what products have swords and search all over your runtime to find them. I've tried to brainstorm a logical way to install everything, but there simply isn't one that will be satisfactory to everybody. If you were to start a thread to see how everybody organizes their runtimes, you'll probably find a hundred different ways of doing it.

If you get a bad installation from a store, contact the store to see if they'll fix it and provide a new download. If it's a freebie, just thank the freebie provider for giving something away. If a freebie provider gets more complaints than thanks, they'll think twice of offering one in the future.

It would be a huge first step if Poser simply published their standards so that vendors knew what was expected of them. And it really doesn't need to be Poser or Daz to establish the standards. It could be done Wiki style. Remember, you can still sell your products without the "certification". The "compatibility logo" just establishes a product as one that has met certain standards.