Digital Art Zone

Why do I always have to enter in the file name when saving a scene?  This is a real nuisance.

Is there some new save setting that will simply do what save is supposed to do and no always act as a “save as” function?

Annoys me to.

I have complained about this in bug reports - I really don’t understand why it doesn’t work like other applications. You can make a bug report, selecting Feature under Severity, to ask for them to change it - maybe they thought my plaintive cries were an individual eccentricity.

Shouldn’t it only prompt you on the first save? That what it does with me, and subsequent saves don’t require confirmation.

I don’t see this behaviour as a bug. I’d hate to overwrite a scene through error because I wasn’t asked.

mac

Other application ask for a name only on new, as yet untitled, documents - if you open a file (not merge/place it into an empty file) then you can save without needing to enter a name. I’m not convinced that prompting does protect from overwriting anyway - if one gets into the habit of clicking yes I do want to overwrite it because File>Save keeps acting like File>Save as then it will be very easy to say yes, overwrite when that isn’t the desired behaviour. Like an over-active anti-virus, too many prompts can be as bad as too few.

Personally I like this feature as if I open as Daz scene file if I add a light file from content or a complete scene file and I have not given my scene a name DAZ Studio will give it the name of that light set or or scene file so I see it as a safety back up device to make sure I don’t overwrite my content.

I don’t fined it much hassle to click on that save button one more time I find it only happens the first time after I open a scene I have been working on and only on the first save of that session. after that I just click on Save and it saves or if I want to rename I have to click on save as.

maclean - 22 June 2012 06:48 AM

Shouldn’t it only prompt you on the first save? That what it does with me, and subsequent saves don’t require confirmation.

No version of Studio has ever behaved this way for me. It is very irritating.

maclean - 22 June 2012 06:48 AM

I don’t see this behaviour as a bug. I’d hate to overwrite a scene through error because I wasn’t asked.

Then don’t use Save, use Save As like you must be doing in other programs?

Studio is currently the “odd man out” in behavior, for programs on all three major platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux) for the behavior of an unqualified “Save” option in a File menu.

I’d be a little more satisfied if they’d just rename it to “Save As” and label it correctly. That’s what web-browsers do, since “Save to the current open file” is meaningless when you’re talking about a webpage.

What would be VERY useful would be versioned saving:

IE, if I make a scene, and save it as “MyScene.duf”, and hit the “incremental save” option, the current “MyScene.duf” would be renamed to “MyScene01.duf” and the current “MyScene.duf” would contain my updated scene. If I make more changes, and hit the incremental save button, I’d have “MyScene01.duf” and “MyScene02.duf”, with the latest-greatest version still in “MyScene.duf”.

That way you have no way to have accidental overwrites, no annoying popup “What name do you want” windows where you can fatfinger your name or version number, you can go back a step (or two or ten) if you realize you liked what you did an hour ago better than what you’re doing now, and you can show your process of assembling the scene to someone else if they challenge you on whether the render is really your own work or not. (The last one is usually more important when what you’re doing is developing a commercial product of some kind than hobby rendering, but it’s DAMNED important when it comes up)

There’s nothing like being able to show your entire process for proving you actually did the work. Like back in highschool on math exams.

It used to do as maclean says, for me too, but now on RC2 it asks for a filename each time.
Incremental save with duf scene files looks easy to script even to me. I may even give it a shot tomorrow.

NeilV 1 - 22 June 2012 09:55 AM

Personally I like this feature as if I open as Daz scene file if I add a light file from content or a complete scene file and I have not given my scene a name DAZ Studio will give it the name of that light set or or scene file so I see it as a safety back up device to make sure I don’t overwrite my content.

Well, and that was wrong by general practice too - if you Place something on the artboard in Illustrator or InDesign it doesn’t replace “Untitled-1” with the name of the palced file, and DS shouldn’t do that when Merging another scene into an untitled scene. I thought that one had been changed at some point in DS4, will have to check it hasn’t reverted.

Richard Haseltine - 22 June 2012 12:24 PM

NeilV 1 - 22 June 2012 09:55 AM

Personally I like this feature as if I open as Daz scene file if I add a light file from content or a complete scene file and I have not given my scene a name DAZ Studio will give it the name of that light set or or scene file so I see it as a safety back up device to make sure I don’t overwrite my content.

Well, and that was wrong by general practice too - if you Place something on the artboard in Illustrator or InDesign it doesn’t replace “Untitled-1” with the name of the palced file, and DS shouldn’t do that when Merging another scene into an untitled scene. I thought that one had been changed at some point in DS4, will have to check it hasn’t reverted.

Waarg, I didn’t even really notice it was doing that! (Sorry NeilV, didn’t quite get what you were saying there until I re-read the quote in Richard’s post). My process though involves immediately saving with a filename to start the incremental filename thing so I guess I wouldn’t run into it much. But that would be extremely frustrating!

But definitely the solution to two bugs is not to keep one bug that happens to mitigate the other bug - the solution is to fix both bugs

Yeah, this bugs me too. And I think it was introduced in 4.5 because I don’t remember it happening under 4.0. Could be wrong though. I didn’t bug report it because my understanding was that for the RC’s they only want major stuff reported (like crashes and inoperability of the new stuff).

The change log is full of changes to save behavior so I suspect this may have been collateral damage.

is this fix in the works?
is there a script or another method to just save the file while working.

the current method really makes saving a chore, so i save less, then when 4.5 crashes i lose more.

in addition, export should populate with “filename” if the file has a name.

any news? not to make waves but this is user interface 101

Edit > Preferences > General tab and fill in your “authorship Information” (just the name part does), it’s a “safety” feature to stop people overwriting someone else’s files.

thanks for the response, but that did not change anything.

edit

ahh it would seem i would have to re-save my saved file 1x to get it just to save. could the name metadata just be added with the computer name when the program is installed?