Hoping someone can help (Reality Plugin Help)

deadgemini_db6f21ea56

I know Reality is no longer supported (officially), but I'm hoping someone might have some insight into a bit of a problem i'm having. First, some details ... I'm currently running Daz 4.12.1.117 and Reality version 4.3.1 on windows 10 Home. As of last evening, everything was chugging along beuatifully as usual, but suddenly this afternoon, upon loading a previously created scene, Reality will not open.

There is no error message, no hang ups or crashes ... simply nothing happens when I click the button. Upon checking the "About Installed Plugins" window, I see that Reality is installed and activated, as it should be, but looking at the log file reveals a message just after the Reality_DS64.dll is loaded that reads "Error writing author data."  I closed Studio and restarted. Same thing. I then restarted the entire machine. Same thing. I then presumed that the file had somehow been damaged, so dug up the original install files for Reality, wiped the current install out and reinstalled. No luck.

My next, and loathesome, course is to reinstall Studio itself, but I'm not entirely sure that it's necessary or will prove useful in any way as there appears to be nothing else amiss with the program itself. So far as I can tell, everything else is operating as expected. I've poked around a few other plugin issue threads (some from the ancient past, even) but can't seem to find anything that actually aligns to my issue. Most report some sort of error that accompanies the plugin failure, but as I said ... I got nothing.

So, my hope is that someone out there may know a little something about what's going on and be able to lend a hand ... either through experience with Reality or just plugin troubles in general, I suppose.

Anyway, thanks in advance

Cheers

Edit:  As an aside, I did go ahead and reinstall Studio, but, alas, to no avail. As I feared, it made no difference to the situation. I'm completely stumped with this one ... as no information I find is applicable to this issue. I can't even find a definitive explanation of what "error writing author data" even means. I've tried everything I can think of, from running Reality as admin, Daz as admin (which, ironically, it says it can't be run with elevated permissions) to even running Studio on a virtual machine. I'm at an absolute loss here, and not even sure where to attempt to proceed next.

hansolocambo

pciccone himself said that the dev of Reality has been discontinued 5 or 6 years ago. That the code needs to be fixed but, even if it's now open source, nobody wants to work on it.

Best option for you now is to go for iRay rendering. At some point anyone has to follow progress. You can't stay behind and hope that everything's gonna be ok.

pciccone said:

There is an issue. The software requires server activation to work and because of that, I have kept my server running for all these years. But now it's just costing me money that I can't afford to spend. So, I will shut down the preta3d.com website on March 1st 2022 and that will cause Reality to stop working.