Quick Update

Hey fans, 3D artists, 

Due to the magnitude and complexity of Lali's Bits, and the unsupported and inconsistent concept of the pz2 file format, I do not dare make any estimates or promises anymore. All I can say is Ken and I are doing our best with what we can find. 

We're actually finished, in a way. Testers are saying its perfect, provided you have the latest of the latest updates for Poser 9 and Pro. But we cannot give an injection that completely kills all your groups. So it can be done tomorrow, or over a week... I just don't know what Poser / pz2 is going to come up with next for us to have to sort out. One thing I can say is: I am sick to death of it and wanna get going on some new comics. So I want it out the door just as quick as you :) so we are thinking up some very inventive workarounds.

Thank you to all the testers for helping to isolate issues; thank you to all the people at the DAZ 3D, RuntimeDNA and ShareCG Forums for their tips; and that you my fans for your support and patience!

cheers!
E.

to back my opinion of the pz2 format, and not to sound like just a bag of hot air: I have discovered a number of issues that make pz2 very had to work with. I'll name two: One issue would be when I accidentally add an obselete FBM name somewhere, or even a reference to a non-existing morph, the injection process for some reason attributes the wrong morphs to it, which is completely strange because it shows that Poser doesn't double check if the names actually correspond. Apparently they work with load order or something (bad programming IMO). This gets very difficult when you have 150+ morphs and zillions of interconnected dependencies. These errors have found their way into the injection and it takes time to iron these out. 

Another issue is how the group injection doesn't follow suit with the rest of the injection style. Generally pz2 replaces (or adds) anything you put in the code, provided it is the same hierarchical structure as the figure being injected. But with groups that doesn't work, even though the structure is exactly the same. Beyond the element "Groups" its end of story and everything gets replaced. Only with the latest updates of Poser Pro and Poser 9 did they bother to sort that out. 

A third issue is that the only specification of the CR2 format is an unofficial one owned by some Japanese dude (who does nice work mind you). How the fuck is that possible when injections are big business? I maintain I find it strange that they do not provide more support for making injections, especially since half of the figure content is supplied as an injection! And as far as I know, injections have been around for quite a while.

Think about this, forget Lali's Bits for a moment: imagine you're a Poser artist, and you have your custom figures saved in your library, but then you think of some very cool JCM system. So you create it, program it in a clean figure until it is perfect. And you do this all in Poser. Ok now you're happy and you wanna apply it to all your custom figures. How the hell do you do that in Poser? You need to resort to 3rd party software to do it... and that's just half the work. Is that allowable for a $500 application?

I tend to compare it to Microsoft Word, where you can cut and paste anything you want, and export whatever format you wish of the things that you create within Word, whether it may be the text you type, the formatting, the templates, the preferences, headers, etc... everything that Word touches is accessible and more importantly, it supports everything that is programmatically involved with it. Poser does not have this accessibility for a key part of its capabilities, and it makes no sense to me that you need 3rd party software to deal with something you create in Poser, 3rd party software which will always be a few steps behind.  Am I the only one to find that strange?  If you have an application called Pro, I'd expect it to be up there with Photoshop CS6, 3D Studio MAX, Microsoft Word. That's how I would run a development team.

Yes I am a rebel :) I even made posters and movies for the political opposition parties here when we were trying to oust our dictator in the country I live in. I also managed to initiate a organisation the software development of the Geological Survey I worked at within a year of working there as a junior! So yeah, Smith Micro isn't going to get mercy from me haha... especially if they dare to call their product 'Pro'.