Problems loading G8F - Mercy HD issue
I purchased and manually installed Mercy HD by the artist Colm Jackson. I immediately saw that any time I attempted to load any G8F character, or even the base G8F, my system would take about 20 minutes or more to load. I opened the log file and saw thousands of iterations of it attempting to load various Mercy HD components -- this happened regardless of which G8F character I was loading.
https://www.daz3d.com/mercy-hd-for-genesis-8-female-and-genesis-81-female
I uninstalled it, deleting all Mercy HD files from my data, people and runtime folders, and it fixed it.
It's a shame because that artist has some of the best genesis characters. I hope the damaging flaw was limited to just their Mercy HD product and not their other characters, because they have other products I like. Has anyone else encountered the same problem with this product, or any other Colm Jackson products?
Comments
What exactly did the log say about the Mercy elements?
I didn't save the log file, and in response to your query, I went back and pulled the current log - strange, nothing shown about Mercy HD. I could reinstall it and see what happens, but it was a real headache before.
If I remember correctly, there were hundreds and hundreds of lines showing it was attempting to load the various Merch HD elements, but that data was missing. But I had never loaded the Mercy HD character after it was installed...I hadn't gotten around to it yet. So it's a mystery why loading the other G8F assets would link to that specific character as opposed to the specific asset I was trying to load.
About a year ago I had an almost identical problem with the Daz Auto Face Enhancer product. Even when it was not being used, whenever I tried to load a G8F character it would try and load all the AFE elements, and indicated the asset had missing data. It took half an hour to load the base G8F. It was later revealed that the AFE had flawed coding, and it was re-released with the corrections.
When you load a figure DS will read in the details of the morphs, so that it knows which properties to list and how they are connected to each other. It sounds as if the files were badly set up in the latter respect, so that the linksa couldn't be made, or as if the instalaltion was damaged so the the files were unreadable.
Thanks Richard. I'm a bit confused. The problem was that the figures being loaded were unrelated to the morphs of the problematic MercyHD character, which I never loaded. But for whatever reason, Daz was trying to load the MercyHD morphs on the other G8F characters, even though it was not sourced to load.
Once one learns how, manually installing a character is easy and virtually idiot proof. I've got hundreds of character successfully load, so I can only conclude it is a product issue.
It reminds me of another G8 character wherein I had similar issues, Alistair HD: https://www.daz3d.com/alistair-hd-for-genesis-8-male. Even when that character was not sourced to load, it's body was automatically used in any G8M character loaded - in the currently used menu, the Alistair body was always shown at 100%. It was eventually corrected by the PA and reissued. I believe there is a similar problem with the Mercy HD character.
Regardless, thank you for your continued insights and wisdom on this forum - they've really helped me over time.
As Isaid, DS reads all morph files to know which sliders to show and how they relate. In the case of Alistair its default value was 1, so having read it in DS then applied it; this was fixed by an update long-since. mercy doesn't sound like the saem issue, more like bad files or something conflicting with another character (another "Mercy" probably), but without more information it's impossible to say.
This figure causes a lot of duplicate formula errors:
I will create a ticket about it.
EDIT: this turned out to be an issue with my local setup.