"But is Atmosphere really ALL THAT? I mean, hey, do you think any serious game developers could use it to make Everquest or Dark Ages of Chamelot"

I agree. The tech in Atmosphere really doesn't seem to be capable of the type of rendering we see commonly on even the lower end rendering systems games use. Why in the world didn't they build Atmosphere on the Lithtech engine or something else froma  company that actually knows how to do real time graphical effects?

Atmosphere is cute, and with Adobe behind it it will have slightly longer legs than other entries have, but it really isn't good enough for the avatar revolution. Hopefully Microsoft will do something soon - the are working on a  number of projects in this area and they do know how to do real time engines (several of their games are massively multi-player and well rendered in real time).

We have been evaluating Atmosphere for this usage (large world interaction and walk-throughs) and the API doesn't look like it will be useful for more than chat rooms and the rendering engine just - well... look at it. sigh

"How wonderful... something that has almost guaranteed dead-end use,"

Again, agreed. So we have a custom product to manipulate low polygon characters in limited ways. No help there. And it seems to to be geared to Atmosphere. It seems we could have done the same things with a new set of low poly characters for Poser and some improvements to the library system.

I think CL is very passionate about seeing the Avatar thing happen - and that's good, but I think they picked the wrong horse.

"You obviously think it's the best program of it's kind or you wouldn't be using it."

And that means what? That it doesn't have huge gaping chunks of improvement opportunity? That we shouldn't comment on it's flaws? Poser is the best program for it's price, it is far from the best program of it's kind. Hell, the hair deformation functions in the Max system is worth it's weight.

I think Poser is a great tool - but more and more I think we will be using it for prototyping a character before we have them rebuilt under Max and re-boned. We are looking at some long format movie style rendering projects and the more we looka t it the more we see that Poser simply can't do it.

"This is about 3D characters, communities like this one and Poser being a part of all the different possibilities it can be- hello... mcFly..."

I certainly agree that the concept is nice. But Atmosphere? You really think Adobe can pull this off? No. Microsoft would be the folks to hook up with on this. Hell, you'd have done better making the Avatar builder software work to build Quake/Lithtech avatars.

I sure don't mean to offend you on this, and I am sure Adobe is a lucrative partner - but there are valid fears that your (the companies) passion is clouding your judgment.