Hi Martin, I think there must be a difference as I cannot use the same twviewer.swf in TW3 as I found out recently. I can only assume it has to be slightly different to handle the new functions as the viewer in TW3 does not work with TW4 output.

A real shame :(

Hi, I posted my concern about the inferior load speed of TW4 compared to TW3 and Nerjaace suggested I use the slice option in Publish.  On the TW3 version on the example I have link to I did use the slice option but it seems to only load the individual scenes a bit faster in my opinion, not the speed of the tour's original loading.  I messed with this quite a bit.

I expect many of you have observed that when you slice the panos this will give you a lower res opening photo gilr depending on the percentage you ask for, then the sliced pano is split into 5 files.  If you compare the total number of bits between the sliced files and the file if you would get if you did not choose the slice option, the sliced files add up to be around 1/3^rd larger.

In the TW4 version something I think could screw up the load and computer system compatibility is in the scene labeling.  With TW4 if you name a scene ODowd Park the file is converted to odowd park.jpg.  I didnt realize that Windows or Mac recognized an apostrophe .  Another example is what happens if the scene title is St. Marys Hospital?  Does it kick it out because of the period?  There are plenty of St., Mr., Dr. and others that would have to be thrown out.  In the TW3 version the scenes file names remain the file names you assign it in Photoshop or wherever and they are not converted by the program.

Would either of these quirks have anything to do with the slow load time?  I dont know but I doubt it.  What about that little gradated radar view, would that slow it down?

Im going back and repackaging all my TW4 tours into TW3, which by the way, you can open a TW4 project with TW3 and you can publish it in the same directory but you get it in a _flashvr directory.

Thats it.  I feel better now.  Tom

Thats it Tom get it all out :). Your quite right slicing does seem to only help the individual panos and not the initial loading. I reckon if a tour hasn't loaded within max 60seconds viewers are simply not going to hang around.

EP really does need to address this as clearly many users are not happy with it and just sticking with TW3. I have loads of plans for TW4 but sad to say I am waiting until it improves which at this stage I have every faith in EP that it will.

I really enjoyed using TW4 with it's full-screen, drop-down and pop-up capabilities and I like the gradated radar that the colors can be changed so I hope you guys at Easypano get this slooooow load time straightened out soon.  I'd hate to see people saying "no thanks" to you and find an alternative.  I'm just glad I figured out that if I use TW3 the load time is fast enough and I didn't loose any clients because of TW4.

I see I had a typo in my earlier posting about TW4 saving pano file names.  If you save a pano with a title of O'dowd Lake, the file will actually read o'dowd lake.jpg, this is with an apostrophe.  Maybe Chinese doesn't use apostrophes.

For file naming:

You must use only a-z 0_9 English letters, numbers, underscore and hyphen. No special characters or parenthesis should be used. This would include not using apostrophes, commas, periods, full stops and asterisks etc.

You can change the display name within the software to reflect whatever you like. Just not the actual file names.

Simply go to the Properties and Actions and rename your scene, thumbnail etc at this point. This does not effect "file" naming.

Regards, Smooth