Digital Art Zone

Purely by chance, I discovered that “Princess of Eire” (previously OS 9 only) had been updated to a new installer along with metadata.

What’s the current state of play on other OS 9 installers?

The older installers seem to be the first priority in converting to zips, though I don’t know how far they’ve got.

From what I’ve seen, quite a lot of the older content with bad MAC installers is now in new installers or Zips.  I’ve already found several hundred of them.

At least the DAZ Originals and PC items seem to be getting converted. I don’t yet know about the PA items.

Actually, I think the older OS X VISE installers had first priority, since Lion wouldn’t run them any more than the OS 9 ones, and most of the products packaged in them were for more current figures, and they showed up first in the store—so were more likely to be purchased. But they do seem to be getting around to the OS 9 ones too. I guess that’s one thing I’ll have to thank Lion for.

Quite a few of the really old items are now delivered in bare runtime folders inside .zip files that you have to install manually. But since you’d have to do that with anything purchased from any other site out there, that ought not to be a hardship.

The zip files are a HUGE improvement, IMO. They certainly seem to be going through the older items. Just to check the download process, I reset and re-downloaded the Civil Servant for Aiko 3, which is a 2006 vintage model, and it came back as a zip file. This item probably had an installer that would not run on Lion. And of course, Aiko 3 probably has the biggest following of the Gen 3 characters…

It’s an odd mishmash. I’ve reset a dozen or two downloads of items which were mostly in OS X vintage VISE installers, and mostly PC items. Some of them have been converted to Bitrock installers, a few with metadata, and some are .zip files. In some cases the base item is a Bitrock while the texture add-ons are .zips, in other cases it’s the other way around.

I think it’s more a matter of “sequence of events” rather than deliberately making a mishmash. They were in the process of adding metadata to lots of older items, just to stave off the endless questions of “Why can’t I see my content in Smart Content?” Then the store switchover happened, and they started converting to zip files. That would explain why we have some old items with new Bitrock installers, and some even older items in zip files. The Civil Servant did not come with metadata, and the thumbnails are still .rsr files…

Well the newer things in the store have the metadata included in the main installer. But I wouldn’t count on them having that set up for the conversions yet.

So by the looks of it, anyone with content that’s in an old Mac installer should probably do a bunch of resets. Especially if metadata has been added.

Hopefully one of the powers that be will drop by with a complete list of which products have been updated. (It would also be worth noting on the product info page.)

gw3972 - 07 July 2012 01:03 PM

Purely by chance, I discovered that “Princess of Eire” (previously OS 9 only) had been updated to a new installer along with metadata.

What’s the current state of play on other OS 9 installers?

I forgot to mention that the product itself has also apparently been brought up to more current standards, so it’s not just the “packaging” that’s changed.