The term 'Runtime' reflects the intention. It is a folder with the information Poser needs during Runtime. This is consistent with the approach that was customary for 'technical' applications in the early 1990's. Large volume storage was on tape, so slow, and only what was necessary was loaded on direct access location. If one uses a metaphor of a library and the scene worked on as a thesis, the Runtime folders are the books on the writing table of the researcher while he writes his thesis.

Yet, recent high level scentific research (LOL!) indicated that most users have at any time 'dozens and dozens' of runtimes connected to Poser, which, to use the same metaphor again, would stand for the whole library, or at least a large share of the books he owns.

What is your idea for a suitable form of Poser content storage for the 2020's?

PS: please do not use this as a starter for a rant on how much you are against the idea of use via subscription. The basis of discussion is legitimate use in the same way we have now. Paid or not paid makes no difference for this discussion.

PPS: Also no need to start rants about Content Paradise Extended Download. Content Paradise is a thing of the past. I have hereby mentioned the issue, it is no more, so in your comments please just look ahead

If we permit ourselves to compare and contrast the features we see as useful and bemoan the difficulties we have at present, discussions can quickly devolve into bashing one app or another. I'd like to avoid that kind of thing, but it may be inevitable, to some extent.

Maybe there's room for an informative tutorial "Successful searches in the Poser Library". I'd certainly consider it worth a look if it enlightened me on better ways to locate the content I have.

There is probably no single best way to organise large volumes of Poser content, though a few considerations come to mind. If there were a way to identify "least recently used" things, like legacy content that could be hived off somewhere low priority, or the ability to exclude certain "runtimes" from searches (maybe a visible way to indicate don't search here).

If content is not adequately tagged (in the sense of relevant search keywords, like #(hash)tags) when sold or distributed, then it remains to the user to do so themselves. Maybe if a slew of respected power users were to describe their organisational strategies, then others could cherry pick the concepts that work for them.

How do we actually search for and purchase/download the content that we want to use? Are there valid parallels to be adopted from there. Do folks have favourite vending hosts that they find easier to search for products on? Is looking at relational database concepts in depth worth anyone's time to identify the common connections between content types and base figures?

I see some worthy attempts to offer relevant content for application to the current scene in other software, though things tend to fall over when one is not used to navigating hierarchies in ways that feel unintuitive. Just look at how our appreciation for smooth, seamless functionality in personal computer operating systems is being impacted by different paradigms applied to handheld mobile devices. Wouldn't it be nice if the same gestures and concepts just all worked the same way on all devices? Yet somehow, we're still missing the ability to do horizontal scrolling in areas of the UI where there would seem to be an obvious need.

I don't think we're in any danger of being able to productively navigate Poser by thought or voice alone in the short term, but the internet search giants seem to invest a lot in AI research. Are we, as Poser users, up to the challenge of brainstorming what we want to see from Poser's next major releases? If we don't, will we just have to like or accept what's fed to us?

More deep thought required (better signal to noise ratio would be nice, too). I'll sleep on it.

I disagree with the metaphor. I have a single runtime (around 90gb), properly organised so that everything is in sensibly-named folders, in a structure that makes sense to me. Every link in the content is correct, thanks to D3D's tools, so everything loads rapidly without ever having to search for stuff. I make use of the Favourites feature to keep track of the content I'm currently working with. So for me the metaphor is this: the Runtime is my library, the Favourites tab is the collection of 'books on the writing table'. I'm pretty sure this will continue to work fine for me in the 2020s…

@An0maleus: Yes the danger of derailing is there. Ignoring the elephants in the room leads to nothing. Let us try to be clear about difficulties we have without falling to bemoaning. The world is bigger than the Poservere. If there are working solutions elsewhere it would be foolish not to make use of the example to test, try, and steal the best out of them.

You mention two key elements:

• proper tagging is an absolute must. We cannot expect Poser to tell the difference between jeans and a skirt, or between medieval and SciFi genre.
• there is no single 'best solution'. Tree approaches are biased towards a solution.

I suspect that anything would have to be enforced by 'Rosity. However, based on past performance, I don't see that happening - they do not currently enforce their standards, and I don't see that changing.

That being said, here are my suggestions.

Rather than using an Ego Folder, go with Foo Outfit by Vendor

The vendor still gets their ego stroked, and the search engine can actually find something.

Since it is 2020, and Poser doesn't actually run on DOS, I would recommend dropping any DOS naming conventions. For example:

thereisnoneedtoramthefilenametogether

there_is_no_need_to_use_underscores

Use _Color Mat _ rather than 01, 02, 03, etc

Absolutely concur, ssgbryan. I've been pounding the need to abandon 32 character filename limits for years. The library does not require it. Longer folder and file names created in the OS still work perfectly in the library, so that anachronism should be purged.

In light of tagging content, I was thinking perhaps of AI as a means of proposing search tags to be applied to newly added content, which the user gets to approve at suggestion time, or ignore (and silence future proposals). Maybe if Poser is idle for some time such an indexing adjunct feature could engage. Maybe with a list of proposals, rather than one at a time. Since Poser now has an effective notification system, it could be obvious that the proposals could be presented through that. When the bell icon has a gold outlined number over it, if the user notices they can click or ignore. Since links within notifications also work, perhaps a link activated acceptance of content tag suggestions could be implemented that way. If there were a way to configure in preferences whether the feature were active or not, and have the user able to edit the list of preferred content tags, that might improve usability

As I have my runtimes sorted by "type (Hair, Figures, Rooms, Props, materials) I would love to be able to search in just one runtime, for example Hair when looking for the pose/materials for a particular hair model, but that of course is just me, if your layout is different your mileage will vary

If you asked 10 poser users how they organise their library you would probably get 11 different answers. Any enforced organisation on vendors, naming conventions etc would suit some people but others would find it annoying. For example. all LaFemme content now come in a LaFemme folder. For me this is annoying as I put all my LaFemme content in my LaFemme runtime, so always have this redundant folder. However I can see it would be useful for those who use a single large runtime.

I think how vendors name and organise content is something of a red herring, since most experienced users or anyone with lots of content will organise it themselves, and it is not much effort to add /change folders once installed.

At least the problem with the search function has been recognised and some attempt to improve it has been made in 11.3 beta. I agree that it would be useful to search individual runtimes, and would go further and allow search of individual folders.

11.3 beta (at least the first one, I haven't tried any other) introduces a purchased content, with automatic install in this as an option. Slightly ot, this is in the poser 11 content folder in the same way the downloads runtime is. I found this a pain when upgrading as I wanted to keep my previous poser version, so I either had to copy/paste the downloads to the new p11 content from the p10 content, wasting disc space, cut/paste meaning p10 would not have access to the content or use the delete library in poser 11 (the manual says you can't do this, but who reads manuals?), and add the p10 downloads to poser. I did the last which worked fine except if I wanted to add content to downloads, (add ons for stuff already in downloads) I had to remember to use the downloads in the drop down, not the default which put content in the non-used pii downloads.

The relevance of this is that I stopped using the downloads runtime for any new content, and I won't be using the purchased content in 11.3 or the quick install of purchased content.

Nails60 posted at 1:38PM Mon, 02 March 2020 - #4382330

I found this a pain when upgrading as I wanted to keep my previous poser version, so I either had to copy/paste the downloads to the new p11 content from the p10 content, wasting disc space, cut/paste meaning p10 would not have access to the content or use the delete library in poser 11 (the manual says you can't do this, but who reads manuals?), and add the p10 downloads to poser. I did the last which worked fine except if I wanted to add content to downloads, (add ons for stuff already in downloads) I had to remember to use the downloads in the drop down, not the default which put content in the non-used pii downloads.

What about symbolic links?

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

Not something I had even heard of, thanks for info.

Hmm. THAT looks interesting!

Nails60 posted at 6:31PM Mon, 02 March 2020 - #4382358

Not something I had even heard of, thanks for info.

I use this method a long time now. Not only for Poser. All my stuff is on network drives (managed by Linux) and I map what I actually use into the runtime folder on the machine I'm working with.

Kinda hard to say... in DS, there are only two folders that absolutely have to have content placed correctly in them - |Data (Poser equivalent: |Runtime|Geometries) and |Runtime|Textures (same as Poser). Everything else can technically go anywhere else, and in my case it does, since I re-arrange everything in a way that makes the most sense to me. And, forgetting where the idea came from entirely, that is where I wanted to go with this...

The principle in my opinion can be summed up in one little Latin term: emptor rem sinerent (That is, let the buyer decide.)

No one system is going to be the best way for everyone, so why does there have to be just one way to organize your stuff? Certainly the item has to know where its mesh data lives, and it has to know where its textures/normals/disp-maps/etc are. But the user shouldn't have to care about that - the user should only need to care about where the file that controls all that stuff lives.

For example, I want to give a figure a pair of shoes. I know the figure's type, so I can immediately go to People|Genesis 8 Female|Clothing|Shoes and start browsing. If I want to change that shoe's color, the Materials directory is right there, so I can pop into that and browse for the color I want. Let's say I want to change the color of the shoes but there's no cute preset material... I select the shoe material, then (back to the Content tab) I bump over to |Shaders|iRay|Fabrics|Floral_Print_By_Blah , and I pick something there which might fill the bill.

From the user POV, All of this stuff I mentioned is stuff I arranged at will and whim. The original could have been destined to be deposited in |People|Genesis 8 Female|!!!!!!111!!BBQ!!!UberCoolVendorBabe|UberCoolVendor's_shoes** or suchlike... but no - I take the time to install the product into a dummy directory so I can make that determination and re-arrange as necessary. After all, this is my computer, not yours.

Oh, Can I split that if needed? You bet your bippy I can - I just install the separate stuff into some other top-level directory with a similar structure (the same structure for |Data and |Runtime|Textures), and link it in Preferences as a separate directory.

...and that's the thing - if Poser (okay, Bondware) were to do anything in Poser to make content wrangling easier, I'd say at the top of my lungs... do that. I understand there is pretty much always going to be a requirement that the product being called is going to have to look somewhere for its mesh and texture sets, but the rest really shouldn't have to. (You could even eliminate the mesh/tex dependencies by calling an internal database that a product's metadata could get installed to so that even that won't be an issue, but that's just begging for bloat and honestly, who cares where the mesh and texture files go?)

** did I mention that vendors who have historically done (and occasionally still do) that stupid "!!" prefix in their directories to push their crap to the top, are morons who need to be publicly executed?

By 'mapping' you mean you run a script that creates the symbolic links to the Textures, Geometry and library type folders into the Runtime you are using?

That way the Runtime you are using stays project specific with very little overhead. Sounds like a cunning schedule.

Penguinisto

I can't see anything you are talking about that can't already be done in poser. If for example you want the materials to be in the same folder as the clothing under the characters tab, you can do this, The only point about the different tabs is if you are saving from within poser when this is how poser decides what it is you want to save, for example if you select a figure and save to the library it will save the figure if you are saving in the characters tab, the pose in the pose tab etc.

Putting geometries in a separate geometry folder is also a convention rather than a requirement in poser. Content from SM used to include the geometry file in the same folder as the cr2 or pp2 file. Obviously this has to be set up when the user facing file is created. I remember reading at Hivewire a vendor who wanted to do the same as SM but was told they had to put the geometries under geometries as that is what users expected.

I have 40 odd catagorized runtimes on an external drive ... I keep my current version of Poser pristine (just what comes with it ... as well as added dll's from the Poser dll page) so I just add runtimes as I need them. It works for me.

Single big runtime (way over 100 gigs) with everything put neatly where I want them. Works fast, loads fast and I expect it to work that way in the future as well. My structure is also such that I can instantly access the installation files of the assets (including product promo images) from a corresponding folder structure.

My Poser run-time on C:, is minimal. Just the basic suite. My ½TB CAD archive on E: is reasonably organised, with many, many folders and sub folders. Each Poser whatsit or set has a 350x350 thumbnail, a meaningful name, the original zip etc and, where appropriate, a mini-run-time. I add WIP needs via the 'external library' facility, off-load when done...

To put it politely, I find Windows File Explorer's search engine is much, much friendlier than Poser's...

House-bound, bored, bored, bored, I've recently downloaded a lot of budget files, including some massive DAZ freebie packs, as yet still zipped. I never thought I'd say this, but my E: Drive is down to 200 GB free. I fitted a SATA slide-mount drawer when I built this CAD-Tower, am about to load it with a WD 'Black' 4TB for my Poser & CAD stuff...

I have spent some of the time while in lockdown to perform a major update of my Poser library. As I have been buying for over 20 years I have a lot of content and the runtimes are split out in some sort of logic, for me at least. One for each of the figures like V4, M4 and Dawn along with seperate runtimes for poses so V4 poses, M4 Poses and Dawn Poses. Other runtime covered Environments, HDRI Domes, Buildings, Cities and so on. I originally had a runtime for Transport and another for Plants and Flowers but these have become cumbersome. Over the last week they have been broken down into smaller chunks, Transport is now separated out into multiple runtimes such as AirCraft, Sea Transport, Land Transport, Military Transport, Classic Cars, Sports Cars and Sci-Fi vehicles. Plants and Flowers have also been dissected with new runtimes Trees, Grasses, Ground Cover, Garden and the much slimmer Plants and Flowers still remains.

All of the runtimes are held on an external SSD reserved solely for runtimes, this allows for easy backup, but in the next few weeks I am looking to add a second SSD and move some of the content that I very rarely use a sort of archive that I can still use with ease. The present set up allows me to go quickly to a runtime and once there the amount of content I need to browse through is limited so it works well for me.

For me, having multiple runtimes attached is a way to have fewer books on my desk, not more.

I have runtimes devoted to particular figures, as well as particular subjects. SF, fantasy, contemporary, horror, politics, etc. If I'm working on a political cartoon, I probably don't need Vicky's fantasy brass bikinis, so I don't attach that runtime. If I'm working on a historical image, I don't need the SF or contemporary runtimes.

At this point, the problem isn't really hardware, it's wetware. Multiple runtimes help me remember where things are. Searching doesn't always work, because I remember what I want, but not what it was called.