Yep - haven't futzed around with 3D/CG in a dog's age (long story short: my soon-to-be-jettisoned job kept me too damned busy... the new job pays way better, but I won't have to run around like a chicken minus its head - I even get to telecommute, and the travel is only 25% now).

So - now that I forsee some time to actually have some fun again, I wish for a small indulgence or two:

1. I get a frigtastic wad of cash thanks to the 300+ hours of saved vacation days that I never got to use. This lets me buy a computer to my liking.  I have a very nice 25" widescreen that I finally replaced my ancient 25" CRT with awhile ago, but it's the rest of the machinery that I'm looking to give a boost.  A solid new Mac Mini with some RAM crammed in it - would that do? Recommendations (err, that don't evangelize or go all fanboy) are more than welcome.

1. I can still safely assume that there's no Poser for Linux? (I'll get the words "lazy bastards" out of my system in advance so I don't constantly use them later. :) )

1. Basically, just looking for a bit of overall catch-up from, say, 2008 (err, minus the adverts, please).

Thx,

/P

Eyup, Peng.  Long time no see.  Don't know a thing about Macs, unfortunately.  There's a thread on here somewhere about Poser with Linux, saying it almost works, if that's any help.

Good to read you, anyhow.

e-machines , really you can't do better.   ;)

or  a 64 bit intel 7 with perhaps 8 cores and many gb of memory.

A friend of mine is setting up P7 and PP2010 in Ubuntu... overall, only AIR is giving dramas, so going withe the 32-bit version of PP (uses Flash, I believe).

But no: no native Linux version. Yet. How awesome would THAT be! :woot: I'd be willing to bloody pay double for that!

I'm working the next library and could probably make changes to accomodate Linux. But what has to change? I just got used to using Mac and am not about to try Linux  - sorry. I might be allowed to retrofit earlier existing Posers for Linux if I ask nicely at SM. But it would be cool to get it working for the next Poser and PPro.

BTW - I prefer Poser on Windows. I bought a nice MacBook Pro but Poser on Mac just seems awkward. I hate the color picker, for example. The cursors are always wrong, too.

Linux is just a less-pretty Mac, BB... as far as the interface goes, and that's if you go vanilla Ubuntu. If you want to, you can pimp it up quite a bit to make it look as pretty as Mac.

Not sure what the real problem with the library is, tho - running in WINE, but there appear to be issues. Mind you, P7 had issues with dialogues disappearing behind main windows which made the whole thing a bit of a no-go for me, but that was a while ago - just made my laptop a dual-boot, so I'll have another play and see if those issues have cleared up.

In another thread, WandW was reporting problems getting the library working in Wine. And I recall odf reporting his issues when Poser 8 appeared. I recall something about the need for path prefix replacement from odf. But WandW cannot get the library to appear at all. I do not know what to do about that.

Acually there is only one cure for that.
Stick to the standard.
Sorry.

Are you planning on gaming or not?  Gaming rigs tend to be a little more expensive.  Getting witcher 2 to run with max ubersampling is going to tax just about any rig I hear.

Long time no read. Nice to see an old face come back.

If you plan on a Mac than what I'm about to say won't mean anything.

AMD is about to put out thier new Bulldozer cpu in a couple of weeks or so. This means that prices are going to drop a bit for both AMD and Intel. Also Intel will be releasing thier 2011 socket in the fall or so. Prices will drop even more. We are talking 6 -12 cores from both companies. Which is better? Who knows until they are released. So if you can wait a bit it may be better value to power ratio in price.

There. A non fanboy answer.

Winterclaw. Wouldn't it rely on GPU more than CPU? The way you can overclock even the smaller CPUs with good cooling. I would think that a big fast card with lots of ram would get you though. SLI or Crossfire in dual, tri or even quad configurations.

Heya - thanks much for the responses. Let me get what I can here... :)

Baggins... err, you're still using Adobe AIR in the newer ones, right? Adobe recently dropped any hope of Linux support for it, so anything that relies on AIR is pretty much going to be a non-starter. The older versions may work (say, 6 or 7), but if it looks anything like Bryce's codebase, that's going to be a hard row to hoe. 

@vilters: Nothing to be sorry about... I make a tidy pile of dough working with VMWare's fine line of products, and here at home my Hackintosh (10.5) has a Windows 7 VM and a Ubuntu 10.04 VM. :)  

I have zero problems with building a whitebox and parking Snow Leopard on it (I'll just buy the disk and install it myself), so hardware isn't really all that much of a difference-maker to me. OTOH, my dual G5 PowerMac is finally at the point where it's not going to do all that well with the newer apps, which is why I'm leaning towards a Mac Mini.  Failing that, an i7 w/ 16GB of RAM and a couple pair of 1TB RAIDed disks should do the trick. OTOH, there's also the laptop angle, since my new job occasionally involves travel too... got lots to think about before I tromp over to Apple or Newegg. :)

@Winterclaw - I kicked the gaming habit a couple years back. I used to be vicious about it up to 2004 or so, but nowadays I just have a Wii for the occasional game with the missus. Haven't done an FPS game since about two years ago. So, I guess that no, gaming isn't much of a consideration for me.

Heya Tashar! Almost forgot...

I heard ab't the new chips coming out - and yeah, it may be worth the wait to see what they can come up with :)

After two mac towers I decided to get a mac mini a year and a half ago.  With computers getting smaller, faster and cheaper going with the mini will let me upgraded computers again in a year or so.  And I will put the mini to work as a media center or something.

The Poser library is currently delivered in two flavors; embedded in the app using Flash, and external using AIR. The AIR version was not because we wanted an AIR version. It was because there was no 64-bit Flash, and we needed Poser Pro 2010 to be fully 64-bit. This meant that there would be no Flash player inside the Poser Pro 2010 x64 application, so we had to make an external version via AIR.

Poser 8 does not have the AIR version at all.

Poser Pro 2010 x32 does have both versions, but SM desires to get rid of the AIR version.

Poser Pro 2010 x64 only supports the AIR version, but SM desires to replace this with the x64 Flash version when it becomes stable.

Personally, I like the external AIR version a lot more because I like it better in its own floating window that I can minimize, cover up, maximize, and its position/size is not affected by switching rooms. I do not find having the library docked in any way helpful whatsoever. I find my activity divided - either I'm loading stuff from the library, in which case it is my primary focus and I want it large, or I'm manipulating the scene and have no use for the library on-screen.

Meanwhile - I know next to nothing about Linux and Windows emulation within it. What difference does it make if a native Linux AIR app is not supported by Adobe. Aren't you emulating Windows? Aren't you running everything as if all parts of Poser are inside Windows? Isn't that what the word "emulator" means?

Oh, I was referring to native Linux porting (which would be hella cool), but okay... we'll go with WINE. :)

That said, I don't think that WINE is all that geared towards AIR at all.

To help out a bit, WINE only provides Microsoft-like APIs and libraries (and sometimes library translations) to the Windows .exe binary. It doesn't provide a full environment at all. Even the WINE acronym (Windows Is Not Emulated) sort of speaks for itself. :)

Personally, I think I'd go with running it in VMWare Workstation instance, in Unity mode (which gives you a full-sized detatched app window that behaves as if it were part of the underlying OS' UI, instead of constraining it in a complete OS UI portal window). 

thx for the inf. updates, though... that part is very informative to me. 

This may also help a bit: http://wiki.winehq.org/Debunking_Wine_Myths

Aha! Not Emulated. LOL Thx I did not know the acronym. That is hilarious.

Quote - ... Meanwhile - I know next to nothing about Linux and Windows emulation within it. What difference does it make if a native Linux AIR app is not supported by Adobe. Aren't you emulating Windows? Aren't you running everything as if all parts of Poser are inside Windows? Isn't that what the word "emulator" means?

Wine is not a real emulator, it is only a very thin API wrapper that makes very little effort to hide the architecture from the program it is running. Meaning: it is very easy for the running program to know whether  it is running in windows or wine, which results often in programs not running at all. In particular flash and air do not run at all, embedded or not (at least that was the case the last time i checked). This is probably the idea behind being able to run poser within wine (which works) and running the library without wine (which works, too) and letting them talk to each other using the loopback interface (which should work in theory).

But even taking that into account: poser is the most stable windows application i tried with wine until now. Personally i would not bother with trying to get the flash (or air) library to work with wine; the python based versions work very well with poser (i use the XL-library from dimension3d, this one has a floating window, too).

EDIT: oops, x-post; too slow again :-)