Hi there! so, I've realized that 12 years of using poser got me into a place where I have a ton of content, split among multi Runtimes in something that I can only describe as havoc and meyhem. I think it's about time to make bring some order into the chaos. every time I get a new pc and install poser, I need to add countless of different Runtimes just to get things working properly.

My question is, what is the right way to merge all of my runtimes into one, without hindering anything? My instict tells me to simply copy and paste everything, merge into one Runtime, and add this (and then, when downloading old projects, I'll have to help poser find things, right?) - but I wanted to make sure I'm not missing anything important.

thanks :)

Custom runtimes are relatively okay to merge. I wouldn't attempt to merge anything into your primary runtime because of the potential of breaking your program. Just watch python scripts and again as you mentioned project pathways.

Don't do it !! Beyond the core Poser installation, stick to external libraries, preferably on a different HDD for safety and ease of back-up.

Having collected Poser 'stuff' since P_3, supplemented by lots of 3DS etc files from my FloorPlan / TurboCAD days, my sprawling 3D archive of 'freebies', 'ports' and 'budget buys' is nearly 1TB.

But, I can directly import 3DS, OBJ or FBX props, or link in external libraries. Then safely close or de-link when done...

I would use P3DO Explorer for this: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/?search=p3do You can open two instances of the explorer, have two windows side-by-side making this task a whole lot easier.

As your main problem seems to be the adding of all runtimes when installing on a new pc: just save the file LibraryPrefs.xml from the old PC and add it on the new one.

C:UsersYOURUSERNAMEAppDataRoamingPoser Pro11

If you want to merge the runtimes, first step i would do, copy all the Libraries on an external harddrive, so you will have a proper backup. Then you can merge Runtimes. The main reason i have done this in the past was to avoid double entries. Seems no big problem, but if you start a search and you get the same item three or more times, it annoys me. Also working with the material room is easier if everything is packed in one Runtime. In my case, i had 5 runtimes, one for V4/M4 figures, one for props and buildings, one for project evolution, one for V3/M3 figures and one for stuff i created by my self. Nowadays i have merged the first four and keeped the last on it's own. The downside is, the library is rather large and poser 11 gets pretty slow, browsing the content is not very pleasant. I have made some hard decisions regarding my content and sorted out quite a few items i haven't been using for a while or even not at all. Hope that answers your question and i wouldn't be glad if it helped.

Here be dragons.

1. Make a zip backup of the runtimes. In fact, do it with a zip file for each runtime, and you're ready to merge. Oh, and keep a copy of the zipped runtimes. That way you always have them. Start the zip at the runtime, itself. Not the parent. Name them something meaningful.

2. do 1. Really make sure you do it. Keep the zips somewhere safe. You can use those to always get back anything. I've gone back to old zipped runtimes years later.

3. In a new directory, unzip the runtimes over top of each other. Put the first in the new directory, then unzip each over it. unzip, by default, just adds new files, overwrites a file of it's already there. There are options to control what happens, if you don't want overwrite or if you want it to warn, at least.

That's it. You've just combined all the runtimes into a single one. If no file clobbering happened, then you're done.

potential problems you can have:

• different runtimes have the same filename in same path but they're really different files. This will ruin anything that uses the clobbered file. I've had this problem. Usually this is for older and freebie stuff. Vendors tend to be more careful.

• it also matters if your filesystem is truly case insensitive or not. By default, macOS is not. It appears to be, but it's not. Same potential clobbering problem. /file will be overwritten by /File. This just increases the "clobber space". Say one person named their file geometries/shoe.obj in one runtime but another runtime named theirs geometries/Shoe.obj. The filesystem would treat them the same when merging.

If you really want to be careful (and this is not easy to do): before you merge the runtimes:

You could detect the duplicate paths but different files with a command that checks two (or more) directory trees and looks for paths that are the same. Once you have that, you need to verify the files are actually different. The tools for doing this (on *nix) are find, grep, jdupes And the command line switches are not trivial. But they do it, and very fast.

de-duping: if you use something like a *nix FS: optional properly de-dupe to hardlinks. You can gain a lot of space this way. Done properly, it dedupes the files, regardless of what they're named, then sets hardlinks with the original filenames. For instance, let's say a vendor has /runtime/textures/vendor/product/hair-TR.jpg and /runtime/textures/vendor/other-product/coolhair-TR.jpg and they're both really the same file, just copied. de-doping will find it, and have just the one file. The second filename is just another name for the same file. Keep in mind that filenames are actually convenience "links" to the actual disk space. hardlinks are just another link to the same disk space. Your OS just gets the same space using a different path. The FS tracks how many names reference the same location. When you delete a HL, it just removes the name from the list. When you remove the last name, it also marks the space as "free" (ie: deletes the actual disk space, since there's no more names that reference it).