Quote - Might want to modify that to 'some' Poser users, PA....... ;P 

 

You know, it's really simple. Dawn is a figure. -A- figure. Not -THE- figure. That was the DAZ trope, and frankly, good riddance. Right up to the g-thing, the whole community was bound to P4 level functionality. Now we aren't. A hefty chunk of the community is still bound to it, either by refusal to or inability to upgrade; those that aren't seem to be expanding their horizons. There have been more new figures fielded in the past year than in the 3 years before it. Which is a good thing. More and more of them are coming out with 'P9 and above only' warnings. Which is equally a good thing, as more advanced tech tends to give more options and better results. More and more external render options, giving higher quality output. If they put ragdoll in the bullet engine next go around, then you have a good, basic animation assisting physics setup (I still want my IK pinning and unpinning capability, though).  My figure spending has cut waaaaay back, and most sales now are props and architectual sets and vehicles. A few basic clothing sets and some time with transmaps and texuring can turn those basics into a lot more. There is no 'one mesh to rule them all'...simply because any mesh that could 'do anything needed' would be so resource intensive, it would kill most computers. Keeping up with so many figures is about as simple as herding cats on speed, but the options you get make it worth it IMHO.....

If you look, vendors are still bound to P4 - I have bought a number of items that I have bought for figures that were designed for P9 or later and they are still built with Poser 4 compatibility in mind.  In 2013, I should not be dealing with .pz2 materials, nor should I be dealing with .rsr files.  Nor should I be dealing with baked in specularity, yet here we are. 

My solution to this is pretty simple.  When I buy a product that has these types of defects (and yes, that is what they are), it is noted in my review of the product along with the docking of stars.  Have .pz2 MATs but not .mc6 materials, minus 1 star.  Using DOS or OS7 naming conventions in 2013, minus 1 star.  Using naming conventions that do not allow me to use Poser's search function, minus 1 star.  Using numbers in place of colors for materials, minus 1 star. 

I am sure the 2nd & 3rd rate vendors will whine about this (like they whine about everything else), but at some point, we have to let Poser 4 and the 20th century go.

I am hoping vendors grasp the concept that making their products harder to use means that I am less likely to buy their products in the future. My definition of "harder to use" is having to fix all of the defects I have listed above.  It may be a bridge too far however.

As far as buying habits, I agree with an earlier poster, I only purchase V4 products that are priced at Prime (or there abouts - I will go to $5, with a few exceptions).  As far as clothing for Dawn, I can only buy what is available.  If vendors don't want to make content for Dawn, they won't be seeing my money.  I have the fitting room and Lyrra's Dawn Fitting Room Magnets (Which rocks by the way - best 5.95 you will ever spend on content for Dawn.)

I have been sharing clothing content between figures since Wardrobe Wizard came out back in the Poser 6 timeframe.  With the release of Texture Transformer, I can now share V4 skins with Dawn (with more figure conversions on the way).

As far as Dawn's impact on the Poserverse, Hivewire3d screwed the pooch by not having the morph packs ready to go on day one.  Which is the same problem we have had for the past few new figures.  You would think that supposedly smart people like the Hivewire3d folks would have made that connection, but I think that when they left DAZ, they brought along a copy of DAZ's institutional arrogance with them to the new organization.