The speaker before me was introducing a new desk top publishing system. I don't recall the name but the company later evolved into Corel, the owner's of Bryce. < LOL! You missed your chance there - you should have got talking! Then you'd be the one who'd be telling us when Bryce 6 was coming out! ;) Yeah, I remember a friend at school saying he was going to buy a 48K Spectrum. I replied, "You're wasting your money - they're never going to produce a game that's more than 16K!!!"

Oh yes, the good old days of computing! Don't get me started. 16K? Luxury! My first computer had 1K and ran at a whopping 0.8MHz! And 22 years on I've got a million X the RAM and it's STILL not enough! Hey - I still remember buying a 16K RAM pack for >100 - with inflation that's about 120,000 X the price of memory today! It must be me being sad, but computers were a hell of a lot more fun in those days... ;)

Well, at least he sort of confirms that there will BE a Bryce 6. I just hope they sort the rendering out so it doesn't take a quad-processor hyperthreaded smack-your-bitch-up machine to render volumetrics with more than one light source.

Thanks for the advice, Anthony. I agree, 205K words is quite a lot, and did indeed contribute to the reasons for rejection (although it was normally the "pace" of the novel that was criticised, which surprised me, because on reflection I thought it was too gung-ho with too many set-pieces and the agents thought it was too slow to get started and didn't grab attention from the offset!) The problem is that at the moment I have very little spare time (I've just started a new business), so although I fully agree that the manuscript needs substantial revision, I just don't have the time. :< Hopefully, this situation will change over the next year as parts of the business can be left to run themselves. Or not. :# Of course your're right in what you say about not "going for gold", but the experience I gained in writing this novel has, IMO, increased my abililty 3-fold, so I don't feel like I've lost out in any way. I suppose I just need to be careful that I don't let any skills I have acquired stagnate. However, as you clearly know what you're talking about I will bear in mind what you say and I will contact you shortly. Thanks again for your post. :)

Aldaron is right. Unclicking the skylab shadowing option turns off all shadowing. I say this is a bug, although I'm sure others would argue.

Cool, let us know what they say, if anything. I rang up Corel's helpline and spoke to a strange female who spoke alien. I quickly hung up, mainly because I got scared.

Yeah, it depends a lot on versions and certainly OS. I'm on Word2002. Earlier versions (of anything, really) tend to be less memory efficient. When I run a render on the Win98 machine, the rest of the stuff slows down quite a bit and individual progs tend to hog all the CPU. On XP, I can run a render, a download in the background, plus loads of other heavy apps with no slowdown and everyone sharing memory happy happy! The only exception I've found is Poser. It instantly grabs ludicrous amounts of memory and hogs it in a nasty fashion. A simple scene with Michael2 & Vicky2 grabbed a whole gig and whilst it rendered nothing else would function. Also - has anyone else noticed that Poser uses between 10 and 20% CPU even when idle? Why? Maybe I should post this in the Poser section. And maybe I should shut the hell up. Sometimes I am so f***ing boring...

Thanks, the links would be appreciated. I'll certainly consider your offer re your site - as long as you're happy with the size of the thing (about 600 book-print pages) and the fact that it contains some strong language and violence (like most books of this type, although there are no "gratuitous" sex scenes or "adult" themes). I'll check out a few options. Thanks again. - oh yeah, and I'll post a couple of para's when I crank up the old PC and find the damn thing... ;)

I often wonder if s/w companies would do me a deal and give me the software without the manuals! I've got about 25 gleaming, shiney, smell-like-new manuals up there on my shelf and I've never looked in any of them! Maybe one day... ;)

I run XP with Word and Bryce open all the time and haven't had a problem. The only thing I have noticed is if I've got lots of apps running at once, the Bryce background screen very occasionally disappears when a menu is brought up in DTE, but that's only if I'm using over 700-ish Mb for other apps. It COULD be a memory problem, but I doubt it (as long as you're running >=128Mb). It might be a corrupted version of Word or Bryce (just re-install them to check) or it might even be a graphics card problem (but that's generally if the graphics start looking a bit frayed - stuff is left begin when you drag things, etc.) I advise re-installing both if it's causing hassle, because XP should be fine multi-tasking with many apps running at one time.

Cheers, clay, nice to know there's a work-around even if I'll never use it! ;)

I saw the rant at brycetech.com too, threatening to close down their site the day that Bryce 6 comes out! It's based on information that nobody else can find! I've searched everywhere for some hint of Bryce 6 but found nothing. If it exists, it's not yet in beta test, though, I know that much.

There's actually a bug in Bryce 5 (my version, anyway) where soft shadow works until you choose a preset sky in the skylab. After that, when you choose soft shadow it shows it in the skylab but not on the main screen. When you go back into skylab the check-box is unchecked. It doesn't bother me now because I never use skylab for lighting, but it royally p*ssed me off before!

Alderon - you posted whilst I was writing that ;) - you CAN add textures to the texture library after SHIFT clicking - I've just done it - but only ones you've created in Bryce, not external ones. I'm confused myself, now... :) I hope this answers your Q.