Penguinisto posted at 11:55AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318904

Question - is this automatic, or does it require the user to get in and beat things up to make it work? I'll go look it up, but if the latter, that's gonna be a disadvantage for most folks (not for the prosumer crowd, but for the consumer crowd).

3 or 4 clicks. OTOH, that may encapsulate the difference between the two user bases. One doesn't become a painter by only painting by numbers.

1. Magnets. Ugh. (Don't move your knee just yet; I detest D-Form just as much, no matter how useful either one may be.)

2. 30-60 seconds... compared to 5-15 seconds. Forget preferences and it's not bashing - the comparison is to point out what SM is up against. Maybe moving it to a dev rig isn't a bad idea after all? On the flip side it does remove a lot from the prosumer user.

All the magnets do is position the clothing for the conversion (which is what takes the longest) they are deleted when you delete the original outfit. They don't stay with the clothing. There is very little DS clothing content available for females outside of "clubwear" or lingerie. For males, it is even worse. Platform is irrelevant, all of us are going to be converting V4/M4 content for a long time to come.

The reason why is that vendors (at least the business-savvy ones) don't want to lock themselves into one market, when they can make something that will sell in two markets.

DS has been able to read Poser native content since the release of DS 4 - there hasn't been a need for material .pz2s for over a decade now; that was a hack for Poser 4. Oh, and let me know when DS vendors learn what goes where in a Poser runtime - as I stated before, I have over 1,000 DS packages installed - not ONE has the content in the correct subfolder, not one.

If DS vendors want to maximize sales, maybe they should leave V3/V4 era production processes behind. With all of the lighting advances on both platforms, I still see painted on underboob shadows, or light reflections painted into the eye maps, for example. 8k by 8k textures don't help, when one still has that nonsense to deal with.

If DS vendors want to maximize sales to both platforms, then they should make those PCFs Poser native, instead of using DSON - there is at least 1 that does, so there isn't a technical limitation. It doesn't take much in the way of time (seconds, for the most part).

The question I would ask every clothing vendor There are 10,000 clubwear outfits available today. Why should I buy yours?

I promise, from this side of things, I get irritated that something cool still comes in only .cr2/.pz2/etc format, instead of .duf/.dsf - however, I fully understand the reason why, and as a result I still keep a small(-ish) Runtime-style directory hierarchy in my on-disk DS dir structure.

DS can read Poser native content - you don't even have to Find someone to help you. An actual quote from DS documentation, btw.

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

Outside of pinup/fantasy art - DS still doesn't have much in the way of native clothing content. Let me know when you can get a week's worth of professional clothing; or winter clothing; or period clothing; etc.

At the end of the day, you are limited to the g figure. And if you want the latest features, as a DS user, you are back on the upgrade train. Poser users aren't - we simply add new features to the characters we like.

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

We've had that capability for years. You seem to be behind on what Poser is actually capable of - it is in the users manual. We find that pretty useful. Certainly easier than trolling forums, desperately looking for that Someone to help us.

As alluded to earlier - the underlying reason isn't laziness, it's maximizing sales to more than one market and minimizing time spent doing that. Vendors aren't dumb, and unless they can get enough ROI on such changes, 'good enough' is going to be as far as they want to get. Make things easier on them programmatically, and problem shrinks.

How is keeping a Poser 4 workflow "maximizing sales"? Just out of curiosity, why is it an article of faith amongst DS users that no one that uses Poser started with a version after version 4?

Endusers aren't using Poser 8 or earlier. The only people using Poser 8 or earlier are the vendors - everyone else has moved on. Since you were away, 'Rosity collected some data on who uses what. 90% of us are using Poser 9 or later, so there isn't a need for material .pz2s, there is no need torunallofthefilenamestoghether, or to use 8.3 naming conventions, etc. Go up to the Poser Technical sub forums. Anything below Poser 9 has been dead since they were made.

I've actually had a vendor tell me they didn't have time to learn Poser 9 features While they were making content for Dawn, a figure that only runs on Poser 9 or later. It's all about the laziness.

Heh - that ain't just a Poser thing (why do you think there's an actual Postgres DB (for CMS) involved on this side of the software fence?

That isn't a plus. The fact that a database is necessary is a software design failure. The system architect failed at the most basic level. Telling the vendors Put your characters in the Character subfolder, it why it exists is easier for customers and the storefront's QA.

It would also be easier for everyone if vendors named their products [foo dress] by [vendor] rather than hiding it in an ego subfolder. It would be easier for everyone if vendors that make texture add-ons for clothing named their product [foo addon for foo dress] and used the same files structure as [foo dress], so the very appropriately named DIM installs them together, so the enduser doesn't have to spend time trying to remember the name of a product.

That however, would require the vendor to look at their product from the perspective of the customer, and we all know that isn't happening.

This is something that's more akin to the honor system than anything you can enforce, and the moment you make it too onerous for the vendor (subjectively, from the vendor's POV), the moment they decide that one market (or the other) might not be worth catering to.

If that is the case then apparently there is no honor among DS vendors.

And more work for the enduser means the customer may purchase from someone else in the future. I have a list of vendors that not only would I not buy from, even if they made the rug that tied the room together, I won't download any freebies they made, just because of all of the work I would have to do to fix their products.

Again, nothing new here, and nobody has a monopoly on avoiding that. This (and the fact that OSX is still, eons later, bitchy about auto-merging files) is why I normally install stuff by hand when I can, renaming or rearranging as I go (and when I cannot, I dump it into a dummy folder, copypasta wholesale into my main dir structure, etc.)

You might want to update your copy of OSX - hasn't been bitchy (in that respect) for a while now. Anyone that is more than a rank beginner on either platform has to have a temp runtime to sort things.

At the end of the day, like everything else, Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to the DS/Poserverse. The difference is Poser's 10% is larger.