OTOY Forums

<b>Notiusweb:</b> Personally I would have put tags in the files for 'Smart Content'. On a bad day, you can simply rescan to regenerate your database, and that would work even if you mangled the directories 4 years ago because that is what Daz told you to do back then.

The solution Daz has chosen was creating another database with a cross dependency to the files to another list of files in another location, so nothing can change, and you need to become a professional database manager.

I need a full reinstall of everything I own to do what daz has now officially and needlessly changed its mind to.

FYI, this is how I sort my MP3 Files. All music is sorted, Genre\Artist\Album\Track - Song. Those are the tags as well as the file names. My database works with all known music players. I started doing this after multiple database crashes in Windows, and the fact that editing a database in a program didn't help me find or clean up files. (I use a program called MP3Tag to make all this happen http://www.mp3tag.de/en/.)

Some feedback as a plugin developer on this....DAZStudio is by far the hardest plugin to support, because when a user has a scene which has an issue, if they send me the scene, I cannot load it in the same state as the user having the issue, because I don't have the products/assets used in the scene installed. It makes support incredibly difficult.

Paul

face_off wrote:Some feedback as a plugin developer on this....DAZStudio is by far the hardest plugin to support, because when a user has a scene which has an issue, if they send me the scene, I cannot load it in the same state as the user having the issue, because I don't have the products/assets used in the scene installed. It makes support incredibly difficult.

Paul

I can imagine that this makes support very difficult. If I have a problem with a scene it usually contains commercial content that I don't think I'm allowed to send even for support purposes. Is there any point in developing a test scene or scenes with non-commercial content that we can use to try out new builds? It might be the case that certain problems occur due to the set-up of a particular computer system rather than the actual plugin. A test scene might reveal this. There could be test scenes to test different things such as geo-grafted objects for example.

Postby face_off » Sun Feb 07, 2016 10:42 am
Some feedback as a plugin developer on this....DAZStudio is by far the hardest plugin to support, because when a user has a scene which has an issue, if they send me the scene, I cannot load it in the same state as the user having the issue, because I don't have the products/assets used in the scene installed. It makes support incredibly difficult.

Paul

Wow, I didn't even consider this, but every time there would be a content-specific issue (new content item or character series), how does an external developer troubleshoot that? Has to downloaded through the cloud again?!
And then there would be 'cloud' interactions and possibly Daz-end phenomenon going on without end-user even knowing it, meaning one's content download could be changed/updated while another's product is not.
Any don't say, "that's unlikely to happen." If it only happens once, that's gonna be the one time we have the issue.

Is there any point in developing a test scene or scenes with non-commercial content that we can use to try out new builds? It might be the case that certain problems occur due to the set-up of a particular computer system rather than the actual plugin. A test scene might reveal this. There could be test scenes to test different things such as geo-grafted objects for example.

Yes, definitely using the stock re-installed DS products in scenes that people send me will be a huge help.

Paul

face_off wrote:

Is there any point in developing a test scene or scenes with non-commercial content that we can use to try out new builds? It might be the case that certain problems occur due to the set-up of a particular computer system rather than the actual plugin. A test scene might reveal this. There could be test scenes to test different things such as geo-grafted objects for example.

Yes, definitely using the stock re-installed DS products in scenes that people send me will be a huge help.

Paul

I think that if users can reproduce a bug, then the ability to start a detailed log from the plug in would be very helpful. i.e. just before the crash.. tick, 'Detailed Logging', and then cause it to happen. Hopefully that can pinpoint where to look. i.e. your morph didn't load, but I can load it on my PC. Are you using the latest rev?

I think that if users can reproduce a bug, then the ability to start a detailed log from the plug in would be very helpful.

I can only fix a crash if I can reproduce it whilst debugging the plugin in Visual Studio. A detailed log IMO would not assist that much. The Poser plugin writes to a log file, and unfortunately it has proven to be of limited value (other than for seeing what version of Poser, the plugin and Octane the user has installed). In Poser there is a python script to copy all scene assets into a folder, and re-path all the file references - which means users can get a scene and all assets to me for debugging, and this has been invaluable. This appears to not be possible with DAZStudio, which is a major impediment to resolving issues that users might have.

Paul

So I went ahead and took the plunge....not really, I just finally installed the 4.9 Beta along side the 4.8. It was painless, it asked me where I wanted to install it, it installed it there, I opened, and it automatically started a content scan where it was 'migrating' content into itself. I got worried because at first I saw my categories, but there where no pictures or anything, but then as the migration went on, they all started appearing. In sum it took about 20 minutes, and I installed Octane plugin into the folder, and it all works rather nicely. I didn't log in or do anything Daz Connect, so I don't know about that part. But as far as the Beta goes, it migrated content over fine, and the 4.8 is fully functional along side it without any issue. I wish the main release could be installed like that, just alongside the 4.8 without much a fuss.

Okay, I tested iRay and it appears to be faster. For example, in 4.8 sometimes it seemed like it wasn't even going when you would start a render. But this one worked much better, immediately produced a dialogue showing progress and rendered pretty fast. So in all, not really bad at all.

I think that if I update one database (ie 4.8), the other one (4.9 BETA ) doesn't get updated...or, something like that. But if I can export my database fine, I might just do it (be a sell-out and go to 4.9).