"I waved a debit card at them for a purchase and it didn't take more than a hair longer than it took for the free downloads. That is all automated." I know. The purchase has gone through, but there is no download link (unlike all of the other stuff I purchased there) just "N/A" in the downloads column. I've checked with the merchant and it should be an ordinary download. Obviously a glitch, but it still gets them a black mark. And it will get a whole lot blacker if I haven't had a satisfactory reply by close today!

You're not the only one. Although I have made a few successful purchases there, a product that I bought on Saturday the 14th, and for which I received a confirmation e-mail saying the transaction was complete, is still showing "N/A" under the download column.

Presumably the weekend has prevented any response to the two messages that I have sent via their "Contact Us" facility, but I have to say that following this experience Content Paradise will now be the very last place that I look at when considering buying content.

Still, at least they usually show where the main hosting for the product is, so customers can go there instead.

So, from me, CP gets one black mark and an overall customer satisfaction score of 4 out of 10.

Message edited on: 05/16/2005 07:22

"Is it? AMD XP2400+, 1Gb Ram, Radeon 9600 Pro and P6 runs like a train" "A number of frames even have over 10 fully textured (high res) and dressed people in it ( a mixture of M3, Don & Judy) all with hair (some with dynamic hair)." Interesting. I have the same spec machine except that my graphics card is a GeForce FX5200. I think you are a very lucky person indeed to have got Poser 6 to render 10 hi-res, clothed and dyna-haired characters in one scene without the infamous memory bug hitting you. Which just goes to show what a swine this bug is going to be for CL to track down and eradicate! I can get to three M3/V3/S3s with textures, clothes and hair, plus a few props and then the Dialogue Box of Doom pops up: "Poser 6 has decided to report that it is out of memory, even though that isn't really what has happened. Your scene has now been irrevocably corrupted and your work has been lost. Even if you now exit without saving, your current project will be overwritten with a zero byte file. Thank you for flying Curious Labs. Have a nice day." ;)

Just a quick second to John's DialogMate link. It's a great utility that I have used for some time now to get around the inability of Poser 6 (or its predecessor, for that matter) to remember the last folder used for a specific class of file. This was and still is an unforgiveable omission under Windows, but I suspect its absence has something to do with retaining Mac compatibility across a common codebase. I don't count that as a bug, but I do count the memory error as a maximum critical flaw in the product that should never ever have got through even the most rudimentary alpha testing regime, let alone beta and pre-production. However, it hasn't stopped me from getting a lot of use out of P6 so I wouldn't say that it is unusable. After all, I've only lost three scene files through it :( And if you've got a couple of hundred gigs of free disk space it's no great hardship to save your scene with ascending version numbers every single time that you change one parameter dial ;) fwiw I have found that permanently disabling the rather flaky "Use Binary Morph Files" option seems to help prevent, or at least reduce it. I'm waiting anxiously for SR1, but I have a horrible feeling that squashing this one is going to take several attempts.

Go to Edit->Preferences->Misc and disable the option to use binary morph files. Then you'll have to recreate the figure and re-save it to the library. This is a very, very nasty bug that's tucked away in 6 and has caused me a lot of trouble. I used to just disable it before adding figures to libraries, but I've since found that this vile bug can also make its presence known when saving a scene file; as in a recent case where Stephanie Petite lost all of the expression morphs because they were arbitrarily dropped from the .pmd file by Poser 6

I'd missed that discussion. I've been too busy wrestling with binary morph files that drop the morphs from figures saved to the library, and the ever present "You are out of memory, your scene has been trashed and the last six hours of work deleted for you" error ;) I will say that overall I'm very satisfied with P6. The Firefly renderer still hasn't been fixed, but at least it now tells you when it can't continue, unlike P5 which just sat in an infinite loop pretending it was doing something. Even this latest irritation isn't the end of the world, but it is one more to add to an ever lengthening list.

fyi I've just reported this to CL and referenced this thread as your screenshot shows it so well.

Yes. In fact, I only saw this last night for the first time when I tried to render over a procedural background shader. Looks like it's another one for Poser 6 SR1!

I'm glad there's somebody else out there who is annoyed by Punctuation Prefixing. The time that is wasted (yes, that's right, wasted!) renaming files and folders because of this absurdity must add up to hundreds of hours every month across the Poser community! To all merchants I would just say: Please don't do it. It is incredibly annoying. In the end, though, this really comes down to setting proper standards and enforcing them, and that should be the responsibility of the marketplace administrators. Having seen how much irritation this issue causes, it might be nice if Renderosity made it a rule that no product will be accepted for sale if the file and folder names contain spurious punctuation symbols. It also might be nice if a similar rule required all texture filenames to be (a) in a folder below textures with the same name as the product or merchant, and (b) prefixed by the merchant name or ID number (I assume there is one) so FredBloggs_Shoe.jpg or 86201_Shoe.jpg instead of shoe.jpg