///The title says it all.... no news, no updates, no development for years. I know the Poser community isn't dead, but has development finally come to a definite halt? 2.5 years of nothing is a long time in the software development world. Am I too seriously look to the competition for future advancement now?////

I don't think Poser is dead, however I think that Poser before 11 have been slightly falling behind, meaning some new features were added, but they weren't really ones that I think most users were very excited about. Which gave the impression that nothing were really happening. I don't think that 2.5 years of development and not having heard anything is necessarily a bad sign, obviously it depends on what they are doing :) But I would actually be more concerned if they kept releasing Poser versions every year. Simply because its sort of what they have been doing until now and its obvious that if they do that, a lot of people will feel disappointed and might not bother upgrading, as buying new Poser versions with hardly any new features in, might not be very desirable in the long run.

I think the choice of integrating or making use of cycles from Blender was a very good idea and in general they should and I hope they work very well with the Blender community to help improve on this, both for Blender and Poser users. Obviously the biggest mistake with Poser 11 were the lack of decent new characters and im not really sure how a decision to release a new version with such flawed character were made in the first place, but guess the deadline came in the way. No matter how you twist and turn it, characters and content in general from a economic point of view is probably the cheapest form of marketing they can invest in and use to spearhead selling their product, heck its what the whole program is based on, they won't be able to compete with Autodesk should they want to venture into modeling and everything else that you can do in those programs for that matter. The one thing that 3ds max, Maya or most of the other big 3d applications can't do, is to work with 3d characters as easy as you can in Poser.

So I hope that for the next release whenever that will be, they have realized that its important and therefore deliver a complete set of new characters, Males, females, kids, babies, maybe even some of the animals. So they bring them into the next gen. Again it will be a really cheap way to promote a new version, compared to the cost of disappointing their users again and honestly without sounding to pessimistic, I don't think Poser as software would be able to survive that, it will still have users and a community etc. But the amount of work it would require to make a new version after that, would be to much. Unless someone is extremely keen on keeping it a live and throwing a huge amount of money into it, I just don't think it would happen.

But on a brighter note, if they keep improving Superfly and get it better integrated or updated so it follows along with Cycles development in Blender, meaning denoising feature, Adaptive sampling, changed to ACES color encoding rather than sRGB (Which im pretty sure is used now) and improved the features for working with HDRI maps. They have a really good chance. At least when it comes to rendering I think.

Secondly they need to update the UI of Poser, especially how you control lights and cameras and in general get stuff updated and Integrated a "physical based" camera. Both lights and camera need to be easily controlled in the viewpoint, working with them as it is now is very poor and annoying.

If they simply focus on those three main areas (Content, Superfly/Rendering, UI/Light/Camera) I think they could really make a strong comeback for Poser. Ohh and some better documentation of what exactly different settings does, like Superfly, cloth room etc. I think it would do quite fine.