randym77 posted at 10:44AM Mon, 22 July 2019 - #4357719

And on the other hand...emphasizing ease of use for newbs would put them more directly in conflict with games like The Sims, and with DS. I'm not sure that's a competition they can win.

Precisely. It'd be a very tough row to hoe, since they'd be competing against playtime (Sims, SecondLife), and $0.00 low-cost/low-barrier CG art kit (DS)..

I do have a question, asked out of ignorance, though - has Poser changed its rigging between Poser 7 (the last version I have) and 11, or is it the same as it's always been? I ask because if we're talking about going pro, it might help to either change how rigging is dealt with, or to beef up the import/export tooling to translate, so as to ease the workflow a little. Also, I don;t know what Poser's animation capabilities are these days, but that might need a bit of buffing-up and a few tools besides (unless already present and more-than-capable from the pro side of things... again, more of a question asked in ignorance until I get get my grubby little paws on Poser 11).

Lots of factors, but I don't think they should be real obstacles - more gruntwork than anything given the library sets that practically anyone can download and license these days. One big start would be to bump the Python interpreter up to something modern (I read somewhere it's still at like 2.6?), and expose a lot more of Poser's internals to API use... that would give it a big advantage over DS almost immediately (DS is very open API-wise, but everyone hates learning a new language, ECMA-compliance and Java-scented syntax be damned. Tying to Python would be frickin' huge if they could do it, and would allow the market to help them out as well.)