Duplicate Formulas Idea

gamesharkrules

As a disclaimer I have to admit that I'm not currently able to create such a tool myself but I had this idea and thought I might share it. 

It seems like it should be possible to write some kind of script or create some kind of tool that automatically finds and alters these duplicate formulas. Seeing as how we're already running into duplicate formula issues with Genesis 9 this seems to be an issue that we will be dealing with for the forseeable future. I honeslty feel like the people at DAZ3D should probably be the ones to develope this tool as it seems to be a fundamental problem with their system of selling content from users who aren't able to test their product against other peoples products. How is one supposed to know if they're going to be generating a duplicate formula error? Seems that they wouldn't except to name their morphs very uniquely.

An Alternative might be that when an artist submits their work that daz scans their entire library of morphs to check the products morphs against the existing library. I have to say it feels odd that this is an ongoing issue that hasn't been resolved in a way that it simply doesn't contiue to pop up. Seeing as how a person is to pay for a product and then potentially have said product cause massive disfunctionality in the entire program seems like a crippling issue that a company would want to address once and for all. 

Another alternative is that maybe there can be something where when daz detects the duplicate it could ask you to override or rename or something. People with large libraries (the pepole who spend the most money) can buy products freely and know that even if they buy something that would normally generate the error and then have to troubleshoot their way around the error the system manages the duplicate as a built in feature.

I know I would pay money for a tool that roots out and fixes my duplicate formulas or at least going forward a permanent feature like fix coming from DAZ itself would be preferable. It seems like it should be expected and owed to the community for such a thing to occur.

Richard Haseltine

Scanning against all properties would not be possible, since there are multiple stores without even considering freebies. I think a script could ptentially scan for duplicate IDs, which are root of the issue, but the fix would be tricky - an auto-fix mightnot match an official fix, which could lead to issues of its own

gamesharkrules

I agree that scanning against every product is unrealistic. I am imagining that if we had a script that it would be so much easier to identify where the duplicates were coming from. Even if some where down the line DAZ fixes this officially....(can't believe this hasn't been fixed already) if you had made a user side alteration to a product that was causing an individual the duplicate formula error it seems like uninstaling that product and reinstalling it would undo your alteration anyway. 

Even if the script just points you to the two files exact locations that would be good enough for me to want to pay for that product. But like I was saying if that was accomplished it seems like only a small addition to allow for the script to automate the renaming of the incriminated files. 

I don't know maybe people have already had this idea already but couldn't get it to work but I was just putting this out there as an idea and if someone made this I'd be on top of paying for it at the store.

Bejaymac

DS doesn't care what the DSF files are called, just so long as you don't have two in the same folder with the same name, it's the internal asset IDs that DS cares about, they have to be unique to the figure.

Your average character for G8F has around 1600 formula in the DSF files, roughly 950 in the body morph, around 550 in the head morph, and a few others spread through controllers, JCMs and correctives.

You also have asset calls in the DUF files that need to be changed to match the changes in the DSF files.

Takes me longer to uncompress the files and dig though all of the files in a product, than it does to actually do the editing, but then I've been doing it for several years and know what I'm doing.

The problem is most don't think like coders or old school game modders, they've never had to think about coding conflicts, or how big a mess they can make when you do get them, been there, got the t-shirt, and got a lot of wannabe modders butt hurt with me for slapping them down for the mess they made of their mods.

Now a recent DF issue for G8F was due to a simply named asset ID of "alice body", if I had done that character the asset ID would have been "FBM_Bejaymac_G8F_Alice_01", the difference is in the mindset and the workflow.

gamesharkrules

I admit to having made a mess as I have a bunch of characters and morph sets and no I did not go through them one by one to carefully make sure that they were not problematic products. I have felt like it is just an aspect of my use of DAZ studio that I have to load models and wait for the duplicate formula error to appear and just use daz despite this annoying error. That's how much I enjoy using DAZ as a platform.

Again though even if no one wanted to fix this error one way or another does anyone know of a resoource where there might be a duplicate formula suspect list might be or maybe we should start one? For example in my looking through the forums I have come across Alice as being one of these suspects as well but as you've pointed out if I were to fix Alice that would not rid me of my messs of duplicate formulas.