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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.Daz 3D is part of
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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
It's Daz's decision to put assets up for sale. The car wash bundle was the focal point of that day's offerings. Until Daz comes out and says "Quality? LOL. GLHF!", the responsibility for ensuring that the assets they promote and sell are fit for purpose lies with Daz. No one is putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to list defective products for sale.
If they are trying to branch out and find new markets, now is the time to double down on QA, not eliminate it. And it's not like Daz wouldn't have people offering to volunteer to test items if asked.
It's also a fairly obvious, fairly big and fairly easy to fix problem. And it's a product from one of the better and more professional PA's out there imho. I mean someone apparently found the time to write up a sort of fix on the documentation site. And I don't see how a global pandemic might cause a mistake like this in the first place - assuming it is a mistake and not working as inteded for some bizarre reason. (not to mention having people work from home is probably a bit easier for a company that deals exclusively with a digital storefront and digital products). I'm not even angry - thing is easy enough to fix anyways - but just really curious how such a mess even happened and remaines unadressed. DAZ3D seems to work mostly fine otherwise, at least compared to a lot of other places I know.
Not sure what gave you the impression that this was anyone's biggest issue right now, though. ^^;
I really don't have a good understanding of the technical side of things, but as a user for some time now, I have gained the impression that while there are many artists good at creating really beautiful content, only a few of them are really good at optimization and finding that sweet spot where something renders great, but also renders fast and handles well. Which are - imho - just as important. Nothing more frustrating than buying somehting that looks really great and then realizing that loading it up slows your system to a crawl and takes half a week to render.
That being said, I usually really love Linday's content, I own, like, most of their catalogue for a reason. Which is why I am so surprised at this weird product ^^;
I have said this before. A lot of this could easily be automated and the rest is pretty easy to do manually.
This one is simply someone did not do their job. I do not believe that one requirement of accepting a product is not installing the product, loading the product and cycling through all the options, which would absolutely have caught this.
Hi everyone, we are really sorry about installers issues, Daz is aware of the problem and Daz is trying to find a solution. Functionality of installers is not part of the PAs work. We are always trying to bring customers our best and we hope that this is going to be fixed ASAP.
I don't want my post deleted, because quoting a CS email would certainly get deleted, but Daz CS says the file structure of products is on the PA. So just letting you know they are shifting the blame on to you, not in this case they have yet to respond at all but in previous cases with other products and other PA's.
That's great to hear! As I said, while it's a bizarre and kind of funny problem, it's easy enough to fix, so it's all good. If there's an artist whose work is well worth a bit of extra file sorting, it's yours (ofc among some others). I'm looking forward to using the outfits and to whatever you release next!
The expectation with items bought in 2020 at the Daz store, which caters to hobbyists, and is actively seeking to expand its customer base, is not that they can be made to work by experienced users, but that they work properly when purchased by someone starting up Daz Studio for the first time following a simple workflow of load character>select character>load garment>apply/change material like they are shown in Daz's tutorials.
Another 1.5GByte of updates today; well, two updated texture files of 0.5GByte each for product ID 71835 packages 2 and 5 plus a new one; package 6, also 0.5GByte!
At least the previous updates didn't put any of the misplaced files back in the root. It's really sad having to download gigabytes of data to fix what is apparently just a path problem. Like @valzheimer I was able to fix it as soon as I saw the fails in top level directory, and I saw them as soon as I searched for the missing texture. It's also unfortunate that the main Daz program "searches" for the texture but not in the right place. It takes quite a time before the message with the missing file comes up on my system despite the content library being on a PCIe NVMe solid state file system, I assume it is just looking in runtime/textures (see the end of this message for how Daz could trivially fix this).
FWIW I see the following updates:
August 3: original purchase, packages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 (no package 6)
August 10: first update, package 7: IM00071835-07_dForceCarGirlOutfitsTextures7of7
August 17: second update, packages 1, 3, 4
August 18: third update, packages 2, 5 plus a new package 6 (so that is every package now.)
It's about time Daz implemented a completely new download mechanism which doesn't download stuff that is already present. E.g. checksum the files and maintain a list of all the installed files and their locations.
I truly do not understand what is so hard about this. The file sizes are a separate issue but the directory structure is a couple of minutes of drag and drop.
We've downloaded all updates and textures are installed in right folder structure now, so it seems that everything is fixed. A word to updates - the problem apparently was in installing textures in the wrong file paths. Update doesn't move already installed textures from the wrong place (in this case main directory My Daz 3D Library) to right place ( Runtime/textures/Linday/Car Wash Girl Outfits), it is only installing new textures in the right place. Textures from wrong path should be deleted. That's why updates are the same size as original files.
>Update doesn't move already installed textures from the wrong place (in this case main directory My Daz 3D Library) to right place ( Runtime/textures/Linday/Car Wash Girl Outfits), it is only installing new textures in the right place. Textures from wrong path should be deleted.
I anticipated that problem. It's a somewhat general problem; it implies that DIM and, presumably, Daz Central updates are just additive and leave cruft lying around forever. There appears to be a list of all the installed files in /Runtime/Support/DAZ_3D_71835_dForce_Car_Girl_Outfits_Textures.dsx, but it is an XML file. I loathe the use of XML for this purpose; lists, however I can see an easy way to parse this XML.
The problem is that there seems to be no record of files *previously* installed by DIM for a package; I can see the misplaced files in packages 2 and 5 in the DIM installed files list, but that is because my download of the update hasn't completed yet. Consequently there are only two ways to clean up "My Daz3D Library". Tthe first is to know that nothing should be there; I had the misplaced files, a couple of others, and InstallManagerFileRegister.json which seems to, ironically, list the misplaced files plus some others. The second is to write a program to parse the dumb XML file, build a list of all the files that *should* be in "My Daz3D Library" and then scan the whole directory structure for extra files which are candidates for deletion.
The vast majority of Daz users who buy this or indeed any other with a misplaced file error will not read this thread. I suspect there is an opportunity for a PA to write a "clean up" app. Given the recommendation I've seen elsewhere to simply delete the whole library directory and re-install everything there is probably a use for such an app, but I doubt anyone would buy it.
Wouldn't it be easier, when you see an update to an asset with this type of issue, to uninstall the old version and then install the new version from scratch? That should remove everything from where it was put originally.
Knowledge is everything and always makes life easier.
In this case I saw the problem before the update, when I was using the product. It is an excellent product with lots of high resolution textures great for UHD renders. When one of the textures reported a missing file I didn't give up, I fixed the problem in exactly the way described by @valzheimer, so, in this case, I don't have the cruft.
However were I behaving as I normally do, which is to download an attractive product and wait a few weeks, or longer, before using it I would have got the updates, got the cruft, and never known better.
I also only detected the problem because I used one of the textures which was misplaced. Most of the textures (packages 3, 4, 7) were in the right place. Package 6 was missing, 2 and 5 had misplaced files. I could have used the product for weeks, wondering only at why I kept getting massive "update" downloads and never noticed anything.
I simply do not check the reason for updates, I just trust Daz/PAs to do the right thing. Maybe I am at fault for approaching Daz content this way but I think not.
I maintain there is no easy solution in userland or PAland and this is a problem which it is appropriate for Daz to fix. Probably not worth saying that on a product specific thread but it took less time to type than moving 30-50 files to the right place so maybe it is worth the effort.
This is generally the best way to handle an update of this sort. It gets complicated when multiple updates are involved but if you have previous installers that know where everything is they should be able to find their files and clean up after themselves. But as we all should know by now that doesn't always work.
But for non executable files this should be fine. If it leaves the odd texture laying around does it really matter, besides wasting some drive space?
I'm having a problem downloading one of the 5 texture packages. Product ID 71835, Package ID 3, size 481.2 MB. I keep getting "Download Failed!" No other explanation. Anyone else run into this?
I'm going to open a support ticket as well.