SeanMartin posted at 5:41PM Wed, 08 November 2017 - #4317609

"so choices have to be made"

Yeah, more bikini sets and lingerie... wow. Some choice.

As long as people are willing to pay for it over a men's business suit, it will be made. That's supply and demand.

And no, dude, I'm not making it an "emotional issue". I"m looking at a business model where vendors are apparently saying, "Oh, I dont want the additional income!" As a publisher, I can just say, "Well, the paper version of this book is good enough!" and totally lose out on the sale that would come from the extra work needed to create a version for both the Nook and the Kindle. Yeah, it takes time to do it right — probably a day for a small book, as long as two weeks for a larger one — but it's worth having it out there. When a new version of Creative Suite comes out, yes, I have to weigh the pros and cons of upgrading, but I usually do, every other version, because sufficient tools have been introduced to make it worth the money. It's called a business expense, and it makes me a bit more versatile at what I can do for my clients. In that regard, I picked up Poser's latest pro version for ninety-nine bucks. That would be a pretty cheap business expense.

It's not additional income if it costs more than not doing it. Working an extra 2 hours every day doesn't mean much if you're not getting paid for it, but the boss sure appreciates it. That's in essence what you're trying to convey. Back when PAs were making items with Poser companion files, a lot of them found that the difference between making them and not making them was something like 10 copies.. yes, 10 copies. Very low return for hours of extra work to make materials look the same in different rendering engines. That's really the part you need to understand why it wasn't feasible businesswise to keep supporting something that didn't bring in a return on investment. A better use of that time is to simply make a new product at that point because the return is greater.

The backwards compatibility issue comes with files created in Studio 3 that can no longer be opened in 4.9 (or so I have read, please correct me if I"m in error on that). I dont know who made that bonehead decision, but there it is. And every time DAZ releases yet another hootchie-mama, I constantly read on these fora that nothing from previous hootchie-mamas will work on the new one. They seem to have corrected that, a bit, with this Gen 8 and Gen 2 talking to each other, but apparently 3 through 7 are SOL. I wonder how much people invested those. Sure, M3 stuff wont work on M4 stuff — but I have tools at my command that can bridge that gap and extend them even further. But DAZ reinvents its character tech every six months, so taking something you shelled out twenty bucks and some change for Genesis 4 will no longer work with Genesis 8 because the adaptors arent in place for it to do it properly.

And the update of python in Poser 8 or 9 broke a lot of plugins that were never updated by vendors. What exactly is your point? Also I think you're trying to make an assertion without understanding why it was done. You're speaking of scene files in DS3 which were never portable, were hard to make by content creators, and the way they were made you could easily have them corrupted. DS4, once the DSON spec was created had an offical standard for scenes and objects in it (since DSON is a scene specification language that DS never had) and the old clunky way of making scenes (which consisted of many .dso files) was depreciated. Before the old scene files were depreciated, you did have the chance to load older files and save them so they could be used in later versions of DS.. so if you waited 7 years to decide to update, yeah you can't load them, but then in the software industry this is nothing new. So it wasn't a bonehead decision, DAZ Studio actually can create a scene that you can load on another computer or just move to another location on your computer, which it didn't have in previous versions. That would actually be an improvement.

Again as far as compatibility, you're not out of luck upgrading genesis to G8.. you can do it for free by autofitting M4 to genesis, then manually autofit the same outfit to a different genesis figure until you get to Genesis 8. That's how I got my D3 thong onto Genesis 8 male. So you're asserting something that isn't true. Male items do very well with autofit, since most of items aren't high heels or dresses. That's how i get my hair, pants, shirts and undies upgraded...

So explain to me again what I dont "get" about this mysterious industry. Perhaps if we are all so enlightened, then the recurrence of threads like this, which appear to vex you so, will go away. But I'd also ask to remember: when DAZ first introduced Studio, it ran around to every fora out there and, with hug and a wide smile, said, "We wont abandon the Poser base that made us successful."

And yet they have done exactly that.

This is beating the dead horse because they never said they would never abandon poser users. They said they will support poser, but since they don't make the majority of their products they could never make eternal promises and force vendors to make products for any particular software. Besides, even if they put out a single product a month that had could be used in poser, that would be support from them; they never promised to have page upon page of poser products for people to not buy or wishlist. The bottom line is, you use the software that you're comfortable with and you live with the things that choice offers. We're seven years later into this argument where DAZ offered the tech to SM and they didn't want it for the many reasons that's been debated ad nauseum. SM is ultimately responsible for your content needs, so rather than complain and worry about DAZ3D is doing, that focus needs to go to SM. If they can't provide what you need, then you need to withhold your dollars from them and take them to task until they give you what you need. It seems like people are harder on the company that didn't make their software than the one that did, and I feel that's why you're not getting what you need. A competitor ultimately doesn't owe you a thing. Continuously badmouthing a competing company will get you no closer to getting the content you need, besides this type of app war discussion is against this site's TOS anyway.

Let's shift the convo back towards positively getting what you need without talking about other companies.