Install location [issues] -- be aware

mortimer.snyder

So, I decided to try out Daz3D studio on my Win machine.

As I have not a lot of space on my original primary hard drive, I have had a couple others added during the years.

And naturally selected Daz studio to install to one of my newer drives, which have plenty of space.

The install manager, for all the supposed intelligence one might expect from a special software with such name, just decided to nevertheless install or at least to download temporary install files under my original C: drive user profile directory. Promptly got the disk to zero free space there and didn't finish even the main core studio install. Just offered to retry. The install manager didn't apparently have any clue as to why would it fail, didn't have any warnings of me not having enough space (on the disk it wasn't supposed to touch), not to speak of issuing any apologies for messing up. :P

This is despite me even having specified one of the newer drives as %TEMP% for Windows apps -- any reasonable app knows what to do with that environment variable.

What's more, after I started cleaning up the space in C:, I discovered that despite me specifying different drive, Daz3D had promptly installed some components under C:\Program Files\...

This is basic software engineering, for C sake.

Honestly, maybe the 3D software itself is the bees knees, but such horrible engineering on the very basics of software installation inspires no confidence.

Richard Haseltine

Moved to Technical Help as it is not a Daz Studio application topic.

The Temp folder is not used because these are not temp files - the user may choose to delete the zip packags after intall (option in the Ready to Install tab) but they may prefer to keep them around (for swapping content in and out, or for back-up purposes).

You can set the location for downloads, Manifests (the record of what has been isntalled), application base folder, and content  directory in the Advanced Settings dialogue's Installation tab. I don't use a non-standard location for the application path, but as far as I am aware the setting is used for everything - but it isn't the same settings as the DIM installation location (obviously, since DIM needs to be installed before it can initially be set).

By default, Daz Studio will use the location of the Documents folder, plus /Daz 3d/Studio/, as the path for the user's own files - so if that is set to use a location on another drive DS will respect that.