Sargebear, you really havn't heard or understood a word I've said, have you? My copy might have been illegal in countries with weak consumer protection, but not in Sweden (where I am). In two weeks time, I will buy a legal license. I already own legal licenses of P3 & P4. Number of images made with test license: 1. Number of other people I've spread copy or crack to: 0. Number of lines concerning this in my initial post: 2. Number of lines concerning Poser, mostly praise: around 60. People read my post and decide to jump on two lines that may in their small minds be considered morally qusetionable. No please motivate how you can accuse me of starting the rant!

"What you did is definitely illegal" Not in Sweden. I have at no point in this discussion expressed any favourable opinion about true piracy, where programs are spread on a massive scale over the world faster than the official distribution channels. This is what is happening to movies. LOTR could be downloaded of the internet two months before the official release. Be happy this is not happening to your favourite software. Besides, if I could even have tried it in a shop that would have been sufficient. In Sweden we have a saying: "Don't buy the pig in a sack". You have to inspect the merchandise before you buy or you will invite bad business methods. "I would suggest that you wait a couple of weeks thenre-register under a different name" Nah, I will not be intimidated. If people can't stand me, it is their problem. If the discussion can't take different viewpoints, it is everybodys loss. Besides, I'm not very active here anyway, it will soon be forgotten.

"Well don't be surprised if CL or rosity comes after you for admitting that you cracked poser 5. and for warezing" That would only have one effect. I would not buy it. No court in the world (or at least not Sweden) would even try the case, and if they would, all the material in question would become evidence, which is public material available free to anyone who wants it... You are so stuck up on semantics that you can not see any difference between me trying a product before I decide to buy it and real piracy where a product is spread to hundreds of distribution sites within hours of release. Open your eyes. Do you think it is better if I do not buy Poser 5 at all and stick with my Poser 4? But of course, you are so perfect and without fault that you glow in the dark in your little black and white world. You never drive too fast or walk against a red light. You never borrow a taped movie from a friend (which is worse than what I did since you probably won't buy it). You never neglect to sort your trash. You never read private email at work. Well, I do. I'm human. I don't pretend to be perfect. Live with it. I do. There are bigger issues in the world. "Ye gods, haven't they made the hierarchy editor window expandable?????? Using it is like keyhole surgery." Finally something about poser! Yep, it is fixed size. Actually I would have liked to have it as a floating window that acted as an alternate way to select elements. Sometimes it is just too much random clicking before you hit what you are looking or.

Sorry, I just can't help defending myself when I'm getting flamed.

Actually, I don't think the bugs are that bad. Poser 4 was worse. I don't like machine-dependent activation, but I can live with it (although I'll probably apply my fix to the license I buy just to avoid the hassle). Price reductions immediately after release just shows contempt for the dedicated customers, but I never buy anything immediately after release so it does not bother me much. Bad EULAs is sadly a common theme in the industry and it is getting worse. This is an area where people should complain. There is a strong movement in the industry for "Pay-per-use"-schemes, which I find despicable.

Yeah, I can see that, and it pisses me off big time. I agree that I'm in a moral grey area, but it is a very light grey (something like 0xFEFEFE) and shouldn't have to be controversial at all. It is a good prog, I'm buying it. I did not even put any load on CL's server while evaluating it. What the f**k is the problem? My guess is that people are annoyed because they realize that they could have avoided spending money on bad software. It is the same thing you can see when people buy a car. It is always the best car, even if it is a pile of junk that is only held together by the paint. They just can not admit having made a mistake.

"Those of us who pay for things up front are the ones who are punished with rising prices and work places with paranoia mentalities." No, the rest of us are the ones who suffer because you feed crappy products which smother the good ones, since you do not care about the quality of the product you are about to buy. "They do it to prove that they are better programmers than the guys who tried to invent the protection schemes." Which does not prove much more than they put a bit of effort in it, something most protection schemes lack. I'm not involved in the warez scene, but I have several friends there (I'm a programmer, remember. At least a third of the professional programmers are more or less involved in the warez scene.) and I agree with bitplayer that it is not an "industry" or "anticorporation guerilla". For most of them it is kind of a (somewhat wierd) tribute when they crack a program. Most of them would not bother to crack a bad program. I do not agree with them on this, but they are not the organized threat to the software industry that some people think. Hacking is not always bad. I have disassembled and fixed a driver which did not have support for multiprocessor systems. I even documented my changes and sent them to the manufacturer. I got a very nice reply where they thanked me, and in the next revision, multiprocessor worked fine in the official release. Can we please talk poser now?

"But a word of advice troberg you have an illegal copy of P5 if it was a "friends" legal copy you couldn't install it. If it's a "friends" warez copy it's illegal and you will be hard press to get anyone here to listen to your reasoning" I'm a professional programmer. It took me fifteen minutes to fool the registration procedure. CL has not even tried to make it difficult. Don't insult my intelligence. And no, I will not tell you or anyone how I did it. As a professional programmer, I am well aware of the problems of piracy. Still, I do not mind if someone tries my products with intent to buy if they like them, because I make good programs and trust my work. I have been burned so many times by buying products that look good until you try them. A rough estimate is that I've bought software for som $4000 which I have installed, tried and uninstalled. If you add what I've bought for work that is juat taking up shelf space you could easily increase that number by a factor of 10. So excuse me if I do not want to increase that amount, in the process supporting crappy products that the market would be better off without. I bought Bryce without testing it, and have not been able to use it because it puts the work area smack in the middle of the crack between my two right monitors. That's an expensive mistake that could have been avoided easily by testing. Also, let me make one thing very clear. If I couldn't try it, I would not buy it. For CL, the choice is between waiting a couple of weeks for the order or not getting it at all. I don't buy a car from someone who does not allow me to test drive it (actually I've done that two times, but that was from people I trust who lives in another town). As for your examples, they are just plain stupid. A copy does not deprive anyone the possibility to use the original the way stealing does. See the difference between law and morals. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't. The law does not provide the possiblity to test software (actually, here it does...), but is it moral to pay big money to companies that tries to fool you with bad products with nice covers?

Actually, I did not download it off a warez site. A friend sent me ISOs of his (or her, I don't want to implicate anyone) legitimate copy of Poser which I used. As for me giving advise on improvement, isn't it the suggestions that count, not how I reached that conclusion? You can drop the quotes around evaluate. If I didn't intend to buy it, I would not have mentioned the origin of my copy at all.

Gimme a break. It is a crime about the same size as peeking at your christmas presents. I own and paid for Poser 3 & 4. I even paid full price for Poser 4, even though it was released less than two months after I bought Poser 3 (which is why I wanted to try Poser 5 first). I will not spread it further. If I had not liked it, I would have uninstalled it. I only use it for hobby use, so it is my own hard earned money I spend, not company money. If you seriously think I'm hurting CL, please explain why. The only reason any company could be hurt by this type of use is if their products are crap, and then they should get off the market and provide space for better products. Could we now discuss the real content of my initial message: my points in Poser 5? It is a much more interresting discussion and one that we might not have heard a hundred times before.

There is no official evaluation version, I used a third party produced version (sometimes called pirated version). Yeah, I know you are not supposed to do that, but I have a limited amount of money to spend and a lot of software is crap. I want to try them out before I buy. If it's good, I buy, otherwise I uninstall and stop using it. Legally, I may be in a grey area, but no one can convince me that buying quality software instead of software with pretty covers is bad for the software industry or immoral. Other people may use pirated software in other ways, but that is their responsibility. I feel that my use is quite responsible. Besides, what's the problem? It is a great product which I intend to buy as soon as my paycheck arrives.

Thanks Raven, nice workaround! I never thought of trying that.

If it comes to that, I can remap the model and cut up the map in several pieces. A similar problem might arise with shadow maps, but with the new renderer I suspect that this will be solved. Anyway, I usually run my images through a softening filter in the post work. It hides some of the failures in the textures, removes the "too perfect to be real" look and makes it easier to manually correct glitches.

Thanks! That closes the deal for me, I'll buy P5 as soon as my economy gets somewhat stable again (just bought a house). Render time is not a problem, I can let it run for days on that computer if need be (especially since it is a dual CPU with plenty of memory). Now on to the challenge of finding/making good texture maps that can stand up to that resolution! :-)

You are not considering a third generation Firebird? As a proud owner of one of those I've been looking for one for quite a while. Perhaps something for people who wants to do their own Knightrider also? :-) You are the king of 3D cars! /Raw