Have you tried renaming p5 or it's containing folder to see if it will ask you to relocate it? I agree that performing a re-install of vue is unpleasant. All of those personal folders must be recreated etc... I don't envy your predicament one bit. eric

How about getting 3d wiz to scale down those JeanZ for all of them (keeping the uv coordinates, of course!) What kind of kids don't wear jeans? I'd actually like to see the standard clothing packs scaled down as well, since there are so many textures for them! Might be less appropriate for the PS kids, but teens do wear normal clothes. eric

Aww, what the heck, I'll give it a shot! $7.00 11.5 Megs 19 MAT files I'm sure their all wrong, but I think they look quite nice! eric

I just hope the DAZ app will use plain text data files. Think of all the inovation that has come about due to the ascii text file used by poser! Does anyone sell textures without MAT poses anymore? Plus, with such an easy to read format, there will always be someone givine away a free app to convert from 1 format to the other (and back). eric

Hey mighty pete, here's more ntfs BS than any sane person should want :) http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/ I scanned it, and it seemed to have some useful info, though it is very pro MS (I'm not) I use win2k, because I can't afford a mac at this time, and there is really no alternative out there for consumer apps (Love linux, but there isn't a strong enough emulator that I can afford that doesn't drain the apps performance to a useless level....hopefully things will be very different in a year or so) Alekssander, something I thought about shortly after I left an earlier message, is the opengl stuff. Now that brings my system to it's knees and makes it beg for a cycle or two (I have it set to pretty low quality) Perhaps, if you are rendering a large scene, you should turn opengl off. When you think about those millions of polygons periodically being traversed and applied to some drawing algorithm, it is quite a demanding thing, indeed. It's worth a shot. I know my machine (750 mhz) is pretty much useless when the quality is turned up and I have a complex scene (menus take seconds or minutes to respond). Simply put, it is really a lot for the machine to handle. Try doing without it. As for vue and memory, I am a programmer, and I can think of a few odd things that could lead to vue having a limit, but I doubt that is the case. Most likely, the message you have given is due to a new operator returning null which is due to the OS having nothing left to give the app. I guess it is possible to blame Eon, but I suspect the real problem lies elsewhere. Just a thought, Eric

Just to make a small correction, the link regarding partitions and clusters relates to a pre-win98 form of FAT (FAT 16). It is possible there are newly formated FAT16 partitions around, but unlikely. FAT32 allowed for smaller cluster sizes (the real cause of slack space) and NTFS (often XP machines are formatted with this) has even more control. If your machine came with XP, it might be formatted win FAT 32 (the 98/ME table) which is clunky but somewhat more expediant than NTFS (there is more book keeping required for the security features). I know you can translate a data filled partition from FAT->NTFS, but I wouldn't want to risk going the other way. Not sure which to recommend. If you have XP, and mutiple partitions, you should be able to add additional swap files. I don't use xp, but it would be in the Control Panel->Administrator Tools->Manage Computer ish area (that is close to where I find it using win2k. Of course, you will have to run it as administrator to change swap file stuff. I don't know where the fault lies. I have rendered rediculously large scenes without much difficulty (100Ms polys). I have noticed that switching from vue to browser sometimes leaves vue hung, so I don't do that anymore. One suggestion, make sure you have at least the same swap space as ram (or 150% as much). Try and keep the swap file from getting too fragmented (yes, it resizes upwardly on demand with win2k and XP) If you suspect you have a fragmented swap file, Norton can take care of it, or you can .... disable swap file, reboot, defrag, re-enable swap and set it to a good high number I had some really annoying crashes a few weeks back and reinstalled. It runs fine now (actually had to reinstall Win2k recently....kept failing to load logon mgr), so there was probably a bad sector that took out a critical file during a recent shut down. It can't hurt to try that method(though it is unpleasant to reset all of those personlized folders back up) We all know how much windows likes to have stuff reinstalled :) Hope you can read all this mess :0 Eric

I think you might be able to purchas P4 from daz, and possibly from the MP (here) as well. At least, they used to sell plain ol' poser 4 (no pro pack) I use P4 and Vue, and am very happy with the two. I would like propack or p5 for the python scripting, but I need to first buy a new machine before spending more money on software. eric

I've been using GIMP for over a year now, and I think it is great! I've been able to use many of the tutorials written for Photoshop (creating denim, etc) using it, though everything is in a different place. Perhaps we should start a GIMP forum and start a GIMP tutorial section. I found it easier to figure out than Paint Shop Pro and even after a year, I still find new things that I didn't know about. One additional note, GIMP also allows Python scripting, so you can write your own scripts to do all the stuff you find yourself doing over and over again. eric

Could you post renders of those additional faces? Enquiring minds want to know:) eric

Might be kinda neat to strip it down for a ceremonial burial boat (I think they too had that same shape. No sail, nor ores, and much smaller) Nice work, Eric

I agree with some of the others. Free stuff that comes in an exe is of no interest to me. I don't care if you scan for viruses, there are still other things that people can sneak into an executable (trojans, phone home junk, etc) Unless you can view the contents before it extracts, I won't use it. By distributing items in a self extracting zip file, you risk losing those who are unwilling to take a risk (how are they to know it is a zip file with some additional info?) Zips are easy enough, if done properly, not to mention the benefit of allowing mac users to be able to extract and translate the contents. EXEs are a 1 way street and should be used only for relavent things (like software distribution) Poser files are data files, nothing more. This is useful information, and I do appreciate your sharing it. Winzip also allows a similar function (although i think there are limits to it's ability) eric

My suggestion would be (aren't you tired of all of these ideas :) Poll the registry (a quick and easy solution. Brycetech is correct. Look especially in the VB sections of the web. Lots of shared code there, even though you will have to modify it for C++) Also provide the option to search or let the user make the selection via text box and directory search (like the common dialogs allow) this should be available even if you find the entry in the registry. For a few months, I had installed poser on an ntfs partition, to see if it would perform better. The registry pointed to that section, but I was too lazy to move all the other stuff, so I eventually changed it and deleted the other installation. I have 5 or 6 partitions (more if you count 3-4 linux ones, but windows can't see those :)), and a DAZ installation takes many (5-10?) minutes to scoure my machine's contents. I much prefer telling the installation where to put stuff (though I prefer them to make a suggestion in order to minimize my typing) eric

You should be able to get it using win32 API calls. I Don't have access to sdk info at the moment (I'm home now), ut I imagine borland offers some documentation on how to access those dlls. By the way, the registry key in question is: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTpz3file It will reflect the installation which is invoked when a user opens (via dbl click or context menu) a pz3 file. I've often wondered why all the tools require you to show them where it is installed (even vue4 does this). I guess it has to do with multiple installations. If you do use the registry for this info, you probably should allow the user to over-ride that location, in case they do use different runtime directories for different projects. eric

Browse your own registry, find the key .pz3 under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. It's "Default" data points to some other key. That is the key you need to use to identify which program will open up when clicking on a pz3 file. Find it (probably called poserFile or something like that) It should have a few sub-keys Shell->Open->Command . Command has, as it's default value, the fully qualified program and any default arguments that are called. As stated above, there are those who have multiple installations. This solution only finds that one that opens up when you double click a 'Poser File'. One additional word of concern. Thanks to user levels (something I actually agree with windows 2000 & XP), you might not have permission to do much with these keys (though you should be able to read them....I would hope). Visual C++ should enable you to get there, but I have never stepped outside of a programs own allocated registry space in VB, so I can't guarantee anything for VB.) Does this make any sense? (I tend to ramble :) eric

I sent them an email this morning. On one of my downloads, there was some text appended to the binary. Whacked it off with a hex editor and it was fine. I suspect, the cause of that problem produces different symptoms for different browsers. (IE generated a page full of binary goo, mozilla produced binary files that were slightly different from the original which wouldn't run) Last week, I had a similar problem, emailed sales@daz3d.com and the next day, I had an email with new links. You'll probably hear from them soon. Good Luck! eric