DustRider posted at 6:30PM Tue, 06 August 2019 - #4358861

OK, I knew I shouldn't look at the Poser forum, especially this thread, but curiosity got the better of me...

Sucker. ;)

Interesting that you post a link to a video that highlights what you seem to be doing here. I think it's also interesting that throughout most of the video, you could substitute "Poser" for "Lightwave", and it fits amazingly well.

This has been the case for what, 10 years now? It's gotten (a little) better of late, but likely because forum traffic is only what, 1/10th what it used to be in its heyday? Could also be because Poser ain't the end-all/be-all anymore, either (which IMHO is a good thing.)

Before I go any further though, I just wanted to mention that the features Cobalt mentioned aren't asking for the sun, but just asking for what other 3D software already has that she feels makes her life better.

I can grok that - though Devil's Advocate, even asking for a spotlight (forget the sun) might be a bit much, given what Rendo bought after (let's face it) outright neglect for years by a company who was more interested in selling binary corpses and zombies than maintaining living software. Rendo has a lot of work to do just to catch things up and get things stable again.

(....and I don't even want to know what it's gonna take to bring some of it up to speed, because Kai Krause deserves Death by BungaBunga, if the Bryce codebase --which I did see first-hand lo so may years ago-- is any indication... Yeah, yeah, Adobe AIR solved all that, blah blah... Liars. I bet that Kai's cold, zombified spaghetti-code-happy worm-ridden hand is still in there, dammit. It'd be almost impossible to retain that UX otherwise.)

Also, I just have to add a minor correction (probably just a typo on your part?), Lightwave was not the most expensive, and in fact among the big names (at the time it's popularity started to wane), it was the cheapest. Making it's demise even more instructive.

True dat. LW was nowhere near Maya's ~$20k pricetag (seriously, when you got a free SGI Workstation from Alias/Wavefront just for buying a Maya suite license...)

The exact reason I quit the SM Poser forum, and why I quit visiting this forum until Rendo bought Poser. Unfortunately their buying Poser didn't remove the toxic environment. If you really want to know how to improve Poser, and make it attractive for people again, you need to be better than the competition (assuming it remains a "paid for" product). You can't know what the competition does better by sticking your heads in the sand, plugging your ears, and going continually "nanananananana".

It'll take time, but I think this is going to calm down after a bit - even if Rendo has to clamp down on it themselves.

Why? Because IMHO this is it. This is Poser's last, best hope for long-term survival. Even though I use DS on the daily (well, almost daily), I don't really want to see Poser die. At least not yet. DS needs the competition. iClone and others like it need the benchmark to shoot for and hopefully blow past. We all need a healthy and competitive market with applications competing for your attention.