Stop making excuses for t_3

[3dmania]

Hi,

ok. First of all T_3 is well aware of the current situation and to answer the main queston

YES, he is still developing the plugin. How do i know it. I am a beta tester for the plugin, and I can tell you that it will not be long before the current version (1.2.xxxx) will be ready for release, since most of the bugs have been ironed out.

Do not forget that he doing this all by himself and that he had to basically rewrite the whole plugin from scratch.

So please, a little bit more patience

[veil32]

Hi,

ok. First of all T_3 is well aware of the current situation and to answer the main queston

YES, he is still developing the plugin. How do i know it. I am a beta tester for the plugin, and I can tell you that it will not be long before the current version (1.2.xxxx) will be ready for release, since most of the bugs have been ironed out.

Do not forget that he doing this all by himself and that he had to basically rewrite the whole plugin from scratch.

So please, a little bit more patience

And I suppose he can't take 30 seconds out of his precious time to keep paying customers updated?
This license isn't cheap you know. I have always understood and supported anyone taking the time the need to work on anything... as long as they don't ask for my money for it. They moment they do, I expect another level of professionalism and dedication and right now there are literally 12 year old Skyrim modders who are more communicative and professional than t_3.

And no, I don't care if it's t_3's fault, or OTOY's or the King of Norway's. All I care about is getting what I paid for and promises from you, another customer who doesn't represent these people and who's claims I can't verify do not count.

[t_3]

hello angry people. i'd like to clear up a few things.

- you are indeed beta testers that have payed for it - the daz plugin is labelled and sold as beta version. this isn't something irregular, but common practice. in gaming you can even buy alpha versions; the idea is to allow continued development for programs that may otherwise will get no financing. btw, have you ever wondered why there are no integrated high-end renderers like arion, vray, maxwell, ... for daz studio? if you like to discuss this, i'd happily give you some reasons why this hasn't happen and will most probably never happen.

- there is of course no excuse for 8 months without updates, but mainly because i raised expectations that i couldn't fulfill in time. apart from that there are some (good or not) reasons why there weren't any:

complex workflow possibilities, an own nodegraph editor, plenty of automatisms, all working live and interactive in studio, even if studio doesn't have an interface that would suit such an undertaking. the best you might get, following proven ground in studio, is a renderer that you can start at one point, and end after sthg. was rendered; as you may know the daz plugin goes way beyond that, and as such was always planned to be the work of two. unfortunately i lost my co-developer right about the time of release last year. since then i had to struggle to take over his code, fix countless issues, work around problems and so on, until i decided to write almost everything anew myself, as this was the only way to ever reach a solid development state again. 40thsd of 45k lines of code were replaced, another 30k lines added up to the current state; btw, that's enough code to write three other plugins already. average working hrs 7-8 for 7 days a week (on the plugin only);

btw i'm not asking if this will ever pay my bills, nor do i care about sleep i didn't had on this job; so to take the money and run would be a pretty bad deal (for me). i'm still doing the best i can, doing it without support from DAZ, doing it with undocumented black boxes in studio (instancing, geo grafts), an partly insufficient api, but without much compromise in terms of the desired result.

pls understand me right: i don't want to make excuses out of this, but this is clearly not 2025 and no life time also. just 8 months. it did need just as much time to retain a state where it feels right again to give sthg out.

- about the "EVERY SINGLE PLUGIN DEVELOPER HERE" can do it better than me. might be true; obviously in terms of update cycles, clearly in terms of communications, unproven if it is still true for coding and/or doing a daz studio plugin. i did choose a way of integration that does a lot of things in the background to shorten workflow in every possible way. you may call it my fault that i did not choose a much simpler, easier to get by approach. my view is, it just takes its time to do it right on this level, to make finally live for users much, much easier.

- communications; in general: to answer posts - given the state of things lately - just to go into discussions why there is still no update without having anything better to tell that there will be some, won't help you and me all together. from my pov the only way is to have sthg. ready and then go into discussion. in particular: the question was raised if i still visit the forums - of course i do. you can see my forum logins in my profile. and you can rest assured, that a bunch of ppl ranting can produce quite some pressure.

@veil32: you have payed for a beta version, you did get one, and got or will get free updates for a long time, up to and beyond the first non-beta release. btw, you wrote i did lie to somebody. can you point out where this had happen?

- for the moment: i of course know that i need to regain trust in the plugin, my development work, and so on. so the only thing i ask from you is to get a little of your anger out of the way to help me work on that last thing...

[SimonJM]

I am quite happy with what I currently have by way of the beta release and if I ever wish to 'get more' I can export my DS scene as a .obj and import it into the full, standalone version of Octane.
Am I happy about how long things have dragged on for? Not entirely, but I used to be a programmer so I know a fair bit about what can happen behind the scenes. With both DAZ and Otoy changing APIs and SDKs in the midst of an update cycle, well that would drive most people to somewhere just outside distraction!

It may seem a small thing, even not even worthwhile, but better communication is needed; even if it's a weekly output of "still coding". As for more beta releases, I suspect that with the need to fit into the new API/SDK structures there really was not much a chance to get a decently stable version rolled out, or at least, go back to the sort of level of the first beta release which would have had everyone howling and baying for blood. Again, a small bit of communication on that sort of thing would have gone a long way.

Personally, despite not having a lot of money (unemployed for around 4 years now) I am content to wait for a good, stable beta to be rolled out. If that takes another three, four or even six months then so be it.

[Spectralis]

I've been using the plugin for stills and animations without too many problems. I did go through a period where the plugin kept crashing and then unregistering for some reason but t_3 helped me solve this problem. I still haven't worked out why sometimes UV's disappear and I can't get them back unless I reload the object but this only happens occasionally.

I have not delved too deeply into the material area of the plugin so perhaps some people are having problems doing much more complex renders than I am. But despite the long wait between updates the beta plugin has been working for me so not everyone is having problems using it but if you are and can't find a solution then I can understand the frustration. My question is why does the plugin work on both my PC's (I have two licenses) but it's unusable for others? One PC is nearly 5 years old and the other is new - each with different components and versions of Windows. Both have the latest version of DS and the plugin. Is this simply a plugin problem or is there more to it than this?

[t_3]

My question is why does the plugin work on both my PC's (I have two licenses) but it's unusable for others? One PC is nearly 5 years old and the other is new - each with different components and versions of Windows. Both have the latest version of DS and the plugin. Is this simply a plugin problem or is there more to it than this?

it's most of all timing; e.g. what the daz api provides (and when) and what the plugin tries to make out of it for octane, and this is not necessarily depending on how fast a pc is, but on the order in which things occur.

in an ideal world, the host (studio) would be in a given state at any time and would provide indepth info about this state, so the plugin would be able to continuously replicate this state in a manner octane needs it. when following the usual (in fact only "rightful") path to implement a renderer in studio, it would work nearly so but for only one point in time - means you click a "render" button, the plugin grabs all there is and renders along. and during rendering nothing can be changed until you stop it. doing it this way it would have been perfectly stable working since release (a months earlier release ).

but this of course gives away much of what octane is especially capable of - to render that fast, that you can see and judge the final or most likely final outcome nearly in realtime. to get this working, the plugin needs to synchronize the host state constantly, and here is where the studio api lacks of information - they apparently (and understandably) never thought about somebody starting to create an additional live viewport with an external rendering engine. most of the times studio only signals about particular changes to the scene, and even this is more indepth in some areas, less in others. for example there is no direct information that a daz material was deleted. this is especially complicating updates during content loads, where materials might get deleted, or replaced, or just altered by mat scripts, and the plugin needs to somehow find out what happened and why and what the intended result is in combination with all the linked octane data.

or that i.e. materials and cameras are still visible through the daz api, even if they were deleted from the scene (apparently the rest there for undo, but there is nothing that directly tells that). so the only way to find out if a material is still there or not is to crawl the whole scene, record any still used daz material, and now throw away any one that was there in the last run and is (apparently) no longer in use, and adjust the octane counterparts accordingly (not necessarily also a delete). obviously the plugin can't crawl scene contents (hundreds of nodes and materials, several tens of thousands of properties) and do this about 10 times a second to always know what's going on, so it takes what it can get from the changes info studio sends, and tries to build the mentioned scene state for octane as a sort of delta. this is usually the point where own bugs (of course), timing problems or missing/misinterpreted info brings things irreparably down; as studio doesn't wait for the plugin to prepare stuff for octane, and octane just requires to do things in its own order.

example: the current version literally disables the ctrl-n/new function in studio (this is nothing that the daz api provides btw) as long as octane is reseting, as otherwise pressing and holding ctrl-n would bring the process down after a few repetitions, no matter what else i do. octane needs some time to clear out its stuff, to reset the gpus, etc. and if a reset overlaps another - bang. tricks and workarounds like this are quite common (for this plugin) to get work done as reliable as possible, but are very sensitive to changes in the timing also.

i in addition i always tried to find a solution the works as fast as possible, only fast and secure don't go that good together, so in the end its always some sort of compromise.

it's literally like drawing an image remotely - somebody on the phone tells you how to move your pencil doesn't even take a breath, and the expectation is to get a perfect copy of what this person is seeing. good luck with that

ps - another example, just for fun, what i'm dealing with: applying geo grafts multiplies any objects geometry. there is an unmodified version in the base object, there is also an altered version in the base object's geometry cache, the altered versions are duplicated in the graft nodes, nevertheless materials are assembled to the base objects altered geometries, the original materials still coexist in the unmodified geometry of the base object; material zones that will be affected by grafts are duplicated in the graft nodes materials list and usually a default mat set just hides these duplicate/overlapping base geometries by using mats with opacity zero. just we really don't want to have the same geometry multiple times in otane to just hide some by zero opacity mats, as apart from vram waste it will cause visible artifacts when hidden and no-hidden geometries overlap (as they clearly do in this case). and of course still need a mapping for all the materials to apply...

[dustrider]

t_3 - Thanks for the detailed explanation. It explains a lot of the "instability" issues I've experienced. It often seemed like things "got out of sync" between DS and the plugin, like there was some sort of communications problem between the two. I just learned not to do anything in DS while the Octane viewport was open, to be patient, and save early save often. Of course some of this could be from the dual video "card" setup on my laptop.

It will be interesting to see how the new version behaves. From what you described above, it sounds like it may always be a bit of an issue unless DAZ changes a few things?

[UruMike]

Where is the 'Like' button when I need it?

I was a bit worried since Christmas. Not because of lack of communication but because of the silence.
But now and then someone posted you were alive and hacking (pardon the pun )

Since I use Studio and Octane purely for fun as a hobby I was pretty happy with the state the plugin was, working my way around all its quirks...

But I have to agree to SimonJM and chime into the choir: A bit of communication is most of the time all it needs to keep customers happy.
Maybe a short post every two weeks telling what is going on, maybe saying 'Hey the next update is in closed beta now, maybe in a month...' and if it takes longer a short explanation.
Like this we know what's going on and can try to stay calm

BTW I once tried to code a 'selective obj exporter' for Studio. I can feel your pain regarding the API...

Thanks for the update t_3, can't wait to try it!

[Spectralis]

Thanks for the reply t_3. Now I understand what you're up against and why sometimes the plugin doesn't update materials. I also tend to close the plugin before making changes to the scene now just to make sure the UV's and object positions update correctly. Is there a possibility that DAZ might develop DS in future updates in conjunction with OR? A bit like how you're working with the developers of LAMH atm?