Quote - > Quote - And I think the basic thinking amongst the Poser coders is to give us, the user, options.

Options, I have no problems with. Options presented without common sense, let alone intelligence? Now that's a problem, and it leads to features that simply don't get used.

Don't forget to factor in  being tossed around a few times; that has kind of limited some of the the things that needed doing. Since they've multithreaded the whole app, I've been able to run cloth sims on a Vicky 3 mesh that didn't stall or crash the app. The problem hasn't been lack of common sense or intelligence; it's been lack of the same kind of in your face advertising that others have done. Plus the fact that in some cases, they were way ahead of the curve. Dynamics weren't that hot back when.....but there have been enough CGI examples that people are starting to get over the atavistic terror of the unknown, and finding it not so bad. Just at the baby steps, but you can't -force- users to use a feature, and by leaving it in, they got the idea across that it wouldn't bite them.

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Quote - They've never been a content provider; they are tool providers.

...whch puts them at the mercy of the main (and biggest) content provider engine of all. DAZ got spooked into changing its strategic thinking back in 2002, and I suspect that Poser will get its own forced epiphany as time goes on.

If you want to survive long term, going vertical is going to be your best bet. Relying on one external company (and no others) to provide you with a living is a great way to kill your company.

And from everything I have seen to date, it isn't that easy to get off the ground in the regard. DAZ only did it because of the growing Poser user base, and the fact that they were spun off from Zygote, which was getting its professional business buried by the click and render crowd. I'd love it if they found another source for Poser specific figures that blew the current offerings out of the water. Maybe with the work the community is doing now, they will.

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Quote - But Poser has always been a 'Here's the tools we came up with. You can read the files. What can you do?' kind of company; and the community responded.

10 years ago, folks were exploring the limits and pushing into some rather neat territory. Nowadays, a few folks are still doing that, but the vast majority just want their pretty kids, faeries, and bewbage.

Oh bullshit, Peng. 10 years ago, a -handful- of people were exploring and pushing and finding neato things. I was there too.....and you had the same 'I'm afwaid....!' reactions to JCM,s and the other alphabet soups the community created from the vast majority of the users. Hell's bells,  people were spazzing out about Kozaburo's transmapped hair! Yes, there is that lowest common denominator of faeries and boobies and dead-eyed Vickies with phallic symbols. So what? It took DAZ taking and using what was given to the community, but suddenly you had people =learning= how to morph, how to rig a joint controlled morph (because it was the only way to fix error #34551235234645 in mesh design used), make injection poses, etc. There has -always- been a small core of crazed cr2 hackers compared to the user base at large. But that was stalled by DAZ freezing their Poser usage at version 4. Now that no longer holds true, and the creatives are starting to come out of the woodwork again. Note the word 'starting'. This time there is no guarantee of a new Vickie to blow your money on, and a mostly quiet re-evaluation has been going on. Some of those old geeks have been talking to some of the new geeks, and things are being born anew.

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Quote - We have 12+ years of content that can be retrofitted and brought up to useable by modern standards once again.

Yup - and it's mixed in with 12+ years of unusable garbage. 

Don't get me wrong, I like the idealism you're presenting, but the cold hard reality is, there's a reason why most of the promising up-and-comers (as well as nearly every Poser default figure built after Posette and Dork) have failed miserably, and until those shortcomings are addressed and removed, you're going to be stuck floundering in the ever-fading past...

 

Wow....

Guess people will have to sift the chaff from the grain huh? 

Which is being done in more than one place. The business concept of cold, hard reality always forgets that true reality has to take into account the human factor; both as a power for incredible good and as that which truly can define what a mongolian clusterfuck is. DAZ makes good models, for the most part....but they also have been fueled by inertia. Poser users got the next Vickie because that's what they were supposed to do. DAZ has been planning this split since the P5 faceroom debacle. They pulled the trigger in a bad economic environment. Hope they do well. But  my concerns are with Poser and what it can do for me. Inertia has been broken, and people are not just standing there going 'Oh, I can't liiiiiive without Vicky 5.....(moanwailgnashingofteeth). They are going 'What do we do now?' And answers are being developed. Antonia is one; they'll have the 'official' release versions ready soon (as in unzip to the runtime and go). Other projects are either picking up speed or begun. Hopefully SM gets the idea and goes forth and finds a good alternate source of Poser figures. But just because DAZ has gotten a wild hair up its ass and pretensions of Maya dominance doesn't mean that all that content we have is vanished, or useless. Most of complaints about all the V chicks have narrowed down to bad joints, to big a memory footprint due to humongous texture maps, and some bad modelling decisions. The latter can't be fixed, but the other two can. And the longer the G thing stays DS4 specific, the better for Poser....as it makes innovation something to strive for again, instead of waiting for the latest V thing.