Sorry Martin, I really thought you'd solved it but your diagnosis doesn't seem to work on my machine. I've got two hard drives, one of which is split into 4 partitions, plus a zip drive. I copied the seed file to C, D, E, F, G and I and put the pcf file on G. (D is the totally different hard disk and I is the zip disk). It decoded perfectly every time. Back to the drawing board.

Safemode certainly sounds worth a try. I'd like to get to the bottom of what is causing the trouble for some people and not others though. And why only with this one file? I hope to have a fix out fairly soon which will cope with the carriage return & line feed differences. That will get the p3 & animal cd people off the hook. MartinC already has it in the Mac version. As for DOS, I don't fancy doing it myself but if anybody else wants to give it a go I'll gladly share the algorithm with them.

I've got the IS department at work on this now (unofficially) and their current suggestion that it could be caused by another program such as a virus checker running in the background which is stopping the file being accessed. To check for this you need to eliminate all processes other than explorer and systray before running Mover. To do this press ctrl-alt-delete which will bring up the close program dialog box. Then click 'end task' for every program except explorer and systray. Then cancel the close program dialog, run Mover and keep your fingers crossed. If it works, you can do the process again but this time just stopping one application at a time (or do a binary chop if you want to save time) until you find the offending application. My only doubt about this is that I can't see why it would only cause problems with the frog and not other pcf files.

Ok, having sussed that I've got the original frog I've now tried to decode the pcf file and it worked like a dream. The only possibility I can now suggest is that those of you who are having problems are maybe using the frog from the Zygote animals disk rather than the frog that comes with Poser 4. MartinC reckons that the original frog on the Zygote disk used carriage return/line feed, whereas the poser 4 version uses carriage return only. The slightest difference (even one byte) between the seed files used for encoding and decoding would make the resulting obj file unintelligible (that's the whole point of the program after all) and possibly produce an error message, though I would have expected a range check error under those circumstances rather than file access denied. If you really are using the Poser 4 frog as seed file, could somebody who is having problems send me both the pcf and the seed file so that I can see whether the files themselves are faulty. Don't send me the frog file from the original animals disk because I don't have that and therefore don't have a licence for it. You'll just have to trust me that I have Poser 4.

DOS? Aaaargh! Why would you want a DOS version if Poser is Windows & Mac? MartinC has had a look at the problem for me and it worked fine on his Mac. He also pointed out the obvious to me that I've got the Zygote frog with Poser 4. Duh. I've never used any of the Poser 4 animals and assumed the frog was on a Zygote special disk. It's now nearly 1 am so I'm off to bed but I'll have a go at investigating tomorrow.

I'm sure bloodsong's frog likes you really. He's just temperamental. However, I guess I'm stumped now. I'll contact MartinC who did the Mac version. If he's got the frog then maybe he can check it out. Failing that the only thing I can do is ask Zygote nicely if they'll let me get the frog from somebody if I promise to delete it afterwards.

Latest Mover is 1.01, but gives the same file format as version 1.0. I've downloaded the pcf successfully but not having the original frog I can't really do anything useful apart from looking at the header of the pcf which looks OK at first glance. The other possibility that comes to mind for this error is that some other process is using one of the files and won't release it. Do you have Poser running with the seed file at the same time as you're running Mover? Or is the pcf file open in a hex viewer or WordPad? After that I'm running out of ideas.

Bloodsong, I can't find the pcf file on Fun Stuff. Where is it downloadable from? Also, have you tried downloading and decoding the pcf file yourself? It may be that the downloadable one has got corrupted and is different from the one you started with.

I haven't had a chance to look at the pcf file yet (I'll download it today assuming I can find it) but even then I won't be able to decode it because I don't have the Zygote bullfrog figure. I seem to remember the last time anybody had an access denied message it was because one of the files was read only. I never saw the offending file at the time so I'm not sure of the exact details and it's a bit puzzling because the only file Mover writes to is the new obj file you're trying to create. The access denied message is generated by Windows, not Mover, which is why it's in coldrake's snazzy font and the Mover stuff isn't. The range check error sounds like Mover is trying to write a non-ASCII text character to the new obj file which implies a corruption of the pcf file. You can't write anything in the top slot, it reads the pcf header file and is just there to tell you which seed file you should be using. On further thinking about the Mac/PC differences, this would not generate this error. It would just give an obj file that wouldn't work. That will be fixed soon anyway.

Colm, I don't think I was balling you out, and fair enough, yes if your readme files say 'no use except in images' and you had mailed him then I guess you had a right to feel a bit peeved. mea culpa.

Colm, Why not tell the site owner rather than the rest of the world? If he refuses to take your stuff off then you can tell us. Underdog says he's giving credit to the originators. If he had posted my free stuff without my permission but with a credit I'd have been highly pleased rather than p*ssed off. I certainly woulkdn't have moaned to the world before communicating with the 'culprit'. Maz Maz

This problem also occurs if you have a Poser figure holding a prop with both hands. It would be nice to be able to move the prop and for both hands to follow. Alas it is not to be (at the moment anyway).

Great idea. I don't know much about sign language but I believe that the US version is different from the British version, which is no doubt different from the French version and so on. In fact there may be hundreds of different versions to contend with. That aside, I believe that taking any single version (British for instance) there are signs for individual letters and other signs for complete words, maybe even phrases or abstract concepts. Let's say there are 100 different signs in total, then to animate the transition from one sign to any other would need 10,000 different animations (100x100). This may make the concept unworkable and may be why the people who've done it before use only flash images with no transistions. I'd like to think I'm wrong, but equally I'd hate somebody to start such a worthwhile project in a fit of enthusiasm, only to get bogged down by the sheer magnitude of the task. Somebody please prove me wrong.

Bushi, don't forget to add curvature to the lenses so the reflections look right. The thing that always gives away fake glasses in the movies is the fact that they're made of flat glass, and the same applies in Poser etc.

Isn't the left glove just a matter of taking the right glove and 'flipping' it in RDS5? If you can't do this in RDS5 you certainly can in Max. I'd hate to think you're creating it from scratch again. If you can't flip it, send it to me and I'll return it flipped. That aside, she looks a great character. When I've done the 287 other things that are currently at the top of my list I plan to do some medieval & 16th century characters starting with a serving wench or two and an English tavern. Maybe your privateer lady could be one of the customers.