Can I decompress a P5 PZZ file, that is make it into a PZ3, without doing it in Poser? I have a PZZ file I saved in P5 yesterday after much work - I saved to continue work today. Now it only comes up empty after repeated attempts to open. Other PZ files work OK.... Maybe if I could turn it into a PZ3, I could look inside it, see what's wrong. It's nearly 5MB as a PZZ, so it should hardly be empty. Sigh...... :] Fish

What works for me is appending .gz to the file name and decompressing it using "gzip -d " or StuffItExpander - that on MacOS X. It should work with Windows' WinZip or PowerZip too.

Do you have WinZip? You can do it there but it's very very complicated..I think I still have my notes... First association pzz to winzip. (Renaming to .zip doesn't work) Then copy the pzz to another directory. double-click pzz and it opens in a winzip window. I'm on XP and can't drag it out of the zip because winzip can't find it (it's in documents and settings). So.... must double-click on the pzz inside Winzip and the addto zip or whatever dialog opens. click 'new zip' and navigate to where you want it, give it name, and click 'add to zip' Now find the .zip you created, right-click and 'extract to here' and overwrite the pzz. Lastly rename the extension to pz3.

Uh, that sounds complicated. I don't have a Windows box here, but try renaming it to .gz and double-clicking it. Judging from the compression/decompression Python scpript, it's using gzip as algorithm, and .gz is the standard suffix for it.

Stewer - that worked great! Thanks for very useful info. I'm on a Win2K machine, so it works fine on PC too. Winzip understood the file immediately. (with gz ending) Unfortunately the PZ3 file is corrupt - it's truncated. Poser5 didn't save it correctly yesterday.... it cuts off in the middle of somewhere in one of the characters. I'll have to rebuild from scratch I guess. Urk. At least I found out what happened to it. Never happened before, first corrupt Poser PZ3 (or PZZ), after all these years. Hmm.... :] Fish

When I changed the extension to .gz it opened in Powerdesk (I don't have gzip) and at first extracting it from there didn't work ... but when I disabled paths it did! yay. Thanks! So I figured that might be the problem with Winzip too. And it turned out it is. But not at easy as Powerdesk. Revised instructions for Winzip: Associate compressed extension to Winzip. Double-click the Poser file you want to decompress. Click the big 'Extract' button In the dialog, uncheck 'use folder names' Navigate to somewhere where it won't overwrite the file (it won't work if it has to replace the file even if you tell it it's okay to replace) Voila! Just remember to re-select the 'Use folders' next time you use Winzip or a poser install will end up a mess. Oh, and something else I just learned about Winzip. If the file's too big to check whether it successfully uncompressed or not, if you double-click the file and it's NOT compressed, it will simply open in a winzip window. But if the file is uncompressed, it won't show in the winzip window and winzip will give you the 'add to zip' dialog. Neat!

Ah. So if I UNassociate gz from Powerdesk and associate to Winzip instead it will work as well. Thanks!

There are several "zip" algorithms - The most popular on Windows is pkzip, which used to be a DOS program. Default ending is zip. Most popular on Unix, however, is gzip, ending .gz or .gzip. Often used together with tar, resulting in a .tgz or tar.gz ending. New and upcoming is bzip2, ending to .bz mostly. The fact that they all are "zip" compression causes some confusion. What we need to know is that Poser compresses using gzip. BTW, my recommendation for Windows is getting version 6.0 of PowerZip, which is IMHO better than WinZip and free.

gzip here and a pzip there. Old McDonald had a zip... E I E I O... zip zip :)

LOL!!

If you don't care to mess with your file association settings, then the old-fashioned way of just opening Winzip directly and using "File | Open Archive" from the menu (or the equivalent toolbar button) and browsing to it directly works just fine.

I was prompted to pick a name for the uncompressed file in the archive, complete with a suggestion. I obviously chose to just change the extension to '.PZ3'. BTW, since there isn't any path information stored with the .PZZ there isn't any need to worry about whether or not the 'Use Folder Names' box is checked or not when you uncompress it wherever.

I hope that's helpful for someone.

Two applications immediately spring to mind... LOL! Have a look at Zpad... it opens and saves compressed and uncompressed Poser files and can save any Poser format. Also, PBooost 1.4 can do the same in it's Deep File Editor... H:))