Quote - Considering the mass of claims and counter claims that have been trundlled away as supposed fact in these forums, many of which are little more than a very personal views I am amazed at the number of experts who can tell the future.  I have lost count of the number of claims that Daz or SM will go bust unless they do X, Y or Z......no come to think of it I haven't lost count as I was never counting.  

That's why I'm asking for evidence.

A quick check of the marketplaces at the more heavily-trafficked sites (Here, DAZ, CP, RDNA) will replicate what I'm saying - that the vast majority of the stuff made content-wise is for Vicky4, followed at a distance by Mike 4 and Aiko3... who are in turn followed very distantly by Miki, the toon character-du-jour, and a whole pack of oddball bits and bobs.

As for whether or not Smith Micro would die if they didn't come up with some decent default figures? Nah. They won't crash overnight. OTOH, if suddenly V4 was somehow unavailable to new customers (w/o pirating it), I can guarantee you that any new growth would start to wither awful fast.

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The following is conjecture, based on memory. It may be faulty, but...

Back in the days of Poser 4, the original Vicky was still struggling for attention against freakin' Posette. Not until Vicky 3 came out did you have any sort of parity for content.

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The reason I point all that out is not due to any pissing contenst, honestly. I point it out because I want to highlight that Smith Micro is highly dependent on outside content just to stay alive (let alone grow), and by a vast majority the biggest game in town is the V4/M4 series.

To that end, I want SM to step back from feature-bloat for a bit, and to focus on  making a kick-ass mesh, because I want good choices. Right now, there is very little of that. Yes, there is Antonia, whose face is damned tough to mold and shape, in spite of being a bendy little wench. There's Bella, which is cute and has a petite figure that I really kinda like, but that face? Umm, I'm really sorry, but yuck - and you can't do much to change that, judging from the renders. Allison? Allison who? 

I mean, c'mon - I got 'Vicky-killers' in my runtime stretching back to Terai Yuki, AnimeDoll, Neftoon Gal, Alexa, Dina V (snort), Natalia, and beyond! There were lots that I never got to test that were alleged to be the next big thing if only they hadn't been aborted (Anyone else remember "Renda"? Yeah, I thought so.)

[Okay. Begin Rant. Cover your kids' eyes, plz]

Damnit - the third-party ride isn't going to work anymore! I'm sick and fucking tired of seeing some promising figure, only to watch as an initial flurry of support for it becomes a flaccid pile of unusable cheese (see also Antonia's current trajectory. Think I'm kidding? Prove me wrong.)

Yeah, we got WW and Cross-Dresser, but those only produce mixed-bag solutions at best, and require a ton of time and work to get up any sort of wardrobe. Neither one of them fixes bad joints, badly-topo'd mesh, bad UV maps... 

The result? I end up with yet another damned-near-dead bit o' fluff in a runtime directory somewhere, parking its fat and lazy ass all over untold disk sectors, eating electron rinds, watching TV, drinking beer, and in general doing a whole lot of nothing as even it's fucking creator quietly gives up on it. Right next to all the other ones. 

So, why not skip all that bullshit? We really don't need Yet Another Ignorable Feature. Seriously, we don't. Blowing untold hours and CPU cycles to compile ungodly complex features (and Yet Another Tab with a jillion sliders) that only 0.00001% of the user base will ever bother with tweaking on? Seriously? 

Look. Let me save you some time here. A kick-ass figure that can do everything v4 does -- but way better -- will insure that folks will support it at least a little, and who knows - it might even take off if you back it up with some kick-ass initial content this time. Mega bonus points if it can automatically load and conform existing Vicky 4 clothing to it. Push enough default content for it to make the thing worth getting. Don't shy away from giving 'em working genitalia, and don't be afraid to allow the user to morph the unholy shit out of it.

[/End Rant]

 

Anyrate... from Poser? How about, if you must code, introduce some simplicity to the UI? Hide the unholy technical garbage from the user unless he or she opens it specifically in another window?