I have been holding off on installing the SR4 patch untill I am confident that all is well. I still haven't made up my mind as I am getting positive and negative posts at the forum. There ddoesn't seem to be a poll facility here so could you simply post a yes or no based on your upgrade experience of SR4, so after a week I can hopefully get a better idea of whether it is a good or bad patch. Yes = install No = don't install it is more trouble than it is worth maybe = It isn't perfect but install it anyway, because the benefits outway the negatives. Thanks people MaRv

Interested to know as well - I too have downloaded it - but not installed it yet!!

For displacement map users it is a MUST. The shadows finally render OK.

yes

Yes but I uninstalled and then re-installed and applied only the newest patch and the one with the missing stuff. Marque

yes

I have no problem with SR4 myself, but you can try this. First, make a copy of the Poser5 folder including subdirs (if you have disk space, obviously), and call it "Poser 5 copy" or whatever. Then, try to install SR4 on this folder changing the path in the installer, and open Poser via the exe file here and not from the start menu; as the only entries I found in the registry that are Poser related are the PZ3 default application and some links to help and readmes, I think it should work normally and you have the original version still intact (apart from the paths in the registry and the links in the start menu, now supposedly pointing to the "copy" folder). Optionally, if you don't want to screw up the registry or the start menu, you can even install SR4 on the original folder; then, if something goes wrong, you simply re-copy the backup folder over this original one and everything would return to the previous version. Hope this help.

What does SR4 really solve? I do only stills until yet, so what will benefit from SR4? As I understand the Replacement Maps work now. What else? - Walter

.

It's like this: the patch itself isn't bad. People may be having conflicts with other software or hardware (which seems to be a real problem for Curious Labs), but the patch has been P5's salvation for me, so it DOES work, at least under the right conditions.;) The biggest fix is that P5 is just so much faster and runs so much smoother, at least for me. I'd pretty much written it off before, but that has changed. I will say it seems to take even longer to load, but once it loads, it's actually faster than my P4 Pro pack, and that's with XP Home, a 2.0 gHz Pentium 4, and only 256 MB of RAM, so people with faster machines, and especially, more RAM (Poser can use all it can get), should be even happier. I haven't seen any bugs yet (or at least not any new ones) with the patch, none of the problems other people have mentioned. Again, results will vary greatly depending on your software/hardware, apparently. But my machine is just a stock, off-the-shelf HP from Wal-Mart and the improvements from SR4 have been dramatic. Any longtime forumite knows I'm certainly no CL groupie, I've bashed P5 as much as anyone. But quite honestly, I'm impressed. They've fix it up better than I'd dared to have hoped.

"What does SR4 really solve?" So far I've found the multiplying magnets bug fixed and the enter key now works on the delete confirm dialog box without the 4 second delay...most of the time. Other than that and longer load times, I haven't seen much difference. Some new wierd video anomolies, but they're insignificant as far as I can tell.

Ive installed it and am overall satisfied with it. Honestly you really wont know until YOU install it. Poser 5 has been a very hit of miss for everyone. good luck and happy rendering!

Based on the responses in this thread I finally jumped onboard and patched my Poser and now I regret it. Everything is S---L---O---W!!!! I have a P4 2.53 GHZ, 1GIG Rambus 1066 High Speed Ram, Windows 2000 SP4. Things were working allright, with the unusual render lock once in a full moon. Now Poser feels slow as mollasses, what the heck happened??!! Just browsing thru my library brings the eyeglass everytime, scenes I could manipulate with ease now feel much slower too. I wish I could uninstall this servuce pak and go back to SR3. Was SR4 optimized for slower computers maybe?

Plusses Dispacement maps/ shadows Firefly rendering much better on animation. a general feeling of solidity that was not there with previous service packs. (rather a pity really I miss the feeling of will it- won't it) oh and the libraries are much better handled minuses some weirdness in the material room - not really traced it down but have had a couple of instances of complex materials hanging the system. Slower to start up (seems to take a fair time chewing over if it should load the plugins) generally a goodie (I can handle a stable poser with a longer startup time.) lots of fixes under the bonnet I confess it has made me clean up my multiplying runtimes and to get the rest of my modelling directories in some kind of order as a kind of spring cleaning. The material room anomaly is of some concern to me because some of the work I do tends to be batch run overnight. SR3 was stable enough to give me a good nights sleep after a few tweaks. However I have run two animations overnight with few problems. I tend to use one machine for this( a 2.6Ghz P4 with 1 Gb ddr 400 with western digital hdds.) so far no probs - apart from that one material room glitch - I have never had material room glitches before. PaulC

I followed Curious Lab's suggestions and did a clean install of Poser 5 and went directly to the SR4 patch in an effort to solve the extremely sloooow launch-time I was having (compared to SR3), but it did not solve the problem. Still takes several minutes to launch or relaunch Poser, and my system ain't that old (W2K, 2.4 GhZ P4, 2 Gigs RAM). Also, now I get windows hiding behind the material window in the Material Room (texture-find dialogue boxes, Python dialogue, Group Editor dialogue, etc.) May be other problems, but I haven't put everything to the test yet. Arrrgh! Wish I would have stayed with SR3.

Yes. Stable lights under Firefly.

Search for the "no content paradise" trick and use it. Then you can search for the ynsaen tricks over at RDNA and a sticky post over at PoserPros about stability and speed issues. For me, these brought a quicker startup and more stability; not sure for rendering speed, but overall now Poser "appears" to run faster and smoother on my system (Athlon 2.6+ and 1 gig RAM).

Strange that some people are able to get Poser 5 to open and run faster with SR4 and others, like me, have just the opposite results. There was a suggestion that people who installed all the previous SRs as they were released might have a problem with remnants of SR2 that cause Poser to operate slower with the SR4 applied, and Curious Labs suggested a fresh install of Poser 5 with only SR4 applied. I did that, but Poser still opened slower, and I did not observe it operating any faster than before when I opened Libraies, selected figures, etc. I previously ran Correct Reference (using Poser-relative paths) to clear up any mislinked texture files, so I there shouldn't be a problem with Poser slowing down to hunt for textures. Don't know what the problem is, but I did manage to revert back to P5 with just SR3 and will stay there until someone solves the SR4 slowdown issue that some of us are facing. Sigh...

maybe...sincerely i dont feel any difference.noy faster or slower....but i have just a remark..i talked with 3 friends and the licenced havent problems..maybe the people who use crack have some probs no?read at curious .they clearly say they try tostop the piracy

Thanks, lobertyart, I'm sure you meant well, but that's BS! I'm fuly licensed and have been ever since Poser 3, and I have problems with SR4. I doubt that the others who have posted about the slowness of SR4 are illegal owners of Poser or would appreciate the inference otherwise. Now for those who might have a more productive suggestion of solving the slowness problem that some of us are facing, FYI, I had previously removed Content Parasite, but that didn't help the SR4 slowness problem. I thought I read a post somewhere about SR4 installing duplicate files (temp files?) related to Walk Designer, and this may cause slowness of Poser launching. Anyone know more abouit this possibility?

Can't change the display background any more, Content Tab locks Poser. Not sure what else has been screwed up by SR4 yet til I find out. I've re-installed and re-applied the patch and its still the same. I've emailed CL so we'll see what happens. My verdict: don't do it, its a waste of time.

lol!!i will back to poser 3 it will better;)someone have window 3.1 please?

Morf, there's a thread or two posted here about the workaround for the background color issue. As for the "Content Tab", do you mean for the Content Paradise? If so, there are several threads on why and how to delete this worthless item on Poser 5. Libertyart,... huh? Whatcha' smokin'?

Too many items on the main runtime, perhaps? Here I have default folders, !DAZ morphs and figures, and nothing more; all the rest is in separate categorized runtimes. Well, this is the last resort...next, it will be a disk cleanup and defrag, then...uhm...a voodoo ritual??? :-) Seriously, these are the last things I can think, then no more ideas sorry.

Thanks, lobertyart, I'm sure you meant well, but that's BS! I'm fuly licensed and have been ever since Poser 3, and I have problems with SR4. I doubt that the others who have posted about the slowness of SR4 are illegal owners of Poser or would appreciate the inference otherwise.>> Same here. I'm one of the fools who pre-ordered and did extensive beta testing after buying it. So I probably paid Curious Labs double of what you paid for your copy, lobertyart. I don't know if the Poser 5 Beta Forum is still accesible but if so you just have to go there and make a search for SimonWM and you will find lots of my posts with screengrabs trying to get it to finally work rights so your theory is proved wrong. Two years later and SR4 just broke what was bearably productive with SR3. Not to mention we still have a broken hair room, no 3rd party plugins and no new animal meshes.

Terry, thanks I'll have a further search than I did last night when I was feeling peeved.... :) Being pedantic though, if there's a Content Paradise (yes, this is what I meant) then I want it to work. Not cos I love it but cos it makes me worry about what else is broke and yet to be revealed. Lucstef, yes i do have a large runtime (thanks for noticing) - are double-entendres allowed in the forum?? Perseverance I have in buckets (sometimes), so I'll see how I get on :) Hiho, hiho, searching I will go.... Thanks

Guess I'll wait as well. I just installed SR3 about 2 weeks ago! :) SR3 combined with following some of the speed up tips posted by yaensen and at Poser Pros helped a lot....not to mention running Correct Reference. The slowness issues seems to be affecting the faster computers (2.0ghz processors with 2 gigs of ram for example). I've also noted that it doesn't play well on the new HT machines. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between "slowness issues" and "faster, more powerful" computers.