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Just want to say again that I'm not picking on anyone. I'm just venting. The last four days have been spent categorizing all my content. So some of the details have worn my hair a little thin. I hate having to fight with my tools rather than use them...
But I had to do something. It was getting impossible to find anything or easily navigate from item to item. I'm not going to go into a bunch of details, but the changing standards really kill me.
Smart content is useless to me because more than half of my purchased items don't have it. There is no easy way to figure out which packages I need to install, so I end up with Poser items too. Which means both duplicate entries and another place to search. No standard organizational method makes it even harder to locate items. Then add in the non-DAZ site purchased items...
Each one of those makes it a magnitude worse. They just compound the complexity of the situation. Then when I encounter things like mis-spellings my blood just boils. Logically I know its not the case, but emotionally it feels intentional or lazy.
I understand the situation from the PA's point of view. I can even sympathize.
I am a technical writer by trade. I write manuals for aircraft equipment to the Air Transport Association standards, which require something called the "List of Effective Pages." Essentially a throw back to the old micro-fiche days and totally without purpose now, but still required. It lists every single page of a manual along with its associated Revision level and date of edit. And there is no automated way to do this. All done by hand for manuals five or six hundred pages long.
You know what happens when I get one of those dates wrong? I get a dozen phone calls, twice as many emails, and at least two face to face meetings. All because a page date might be wrong. Does anyone actually check if the content of that page is right? Nope. Just that date in the list. It's a real Office Space moment every single time.
And I do remember Poser 4 too. I remember Poser 2 where moving the slightest item could cause the entire program to crash.
This is the first time I've ever encountered the term vanity folder. I can glace through my geometries, textures or libraries folders and locate whatever I need to locate much quicker by vendor. In the end, it's pretty much to each his own. What works for one person may not work for another.
If a user wants to rename folders and contents to suit their needs, there's nothing to stop them. About the only thing the user needs to then learn is how to change the path names to reflect their changes.
And THAT is the key to setting everything up YOUR way, as opposed to anyone else's...that simple skill allows one to basically do anything they want with their content.
The one thing that really frosts my cookies...case of the folder names. I've seen stuff (even some of the older stuff from the store), that had the main products in something like Runtime > all other folders with initial caps and the textures or other parts of the download in runtime > all other folders, lowercase.
You may be asking, 'What's wrong with that?"
Nothing if you are running on Windows...where they will be merged. But if you are running on an OS that cares about case, then you end up with two sets of folders and lots of 'Not found' errors.
That and absolute paths (versus relative paths) are, to me at least, much bigger problems than texture names and such. The absolute path problem, at least among the store items, here, has pretty much disappeared, but it's still around, especially among the freebie items.
What customers have demanded vanity folders? I've never heard a single one ask for this.
If I am going to be rendering a scene with Aztec gods, then I need to sift my content to find the best setting, clothing, hair, and figure. The content creator names doesn't help me with this in the slightest. Of course, I may wish to credit the content maker once I've made those choices, just not at the selection stage.
If I can't find the content, I can't use it. Sure I am constantly reorganizing my runtime and content folders, but it takes so much time, that I might have to abandon it. I work 50 hours a week and attend grad school.
I have at the very least a dozen different dragons ranging from the original Zygote Dragon that is now sold in the PC to Mephistopheles Dragon, Predatron's Moorland and many others. Most of them I know which ones they are by vendor. A dozen folders all labelled dragon or a dozen files labelled dragon head texture isn't much help.
The old habit of putting silly things like "!" in front of names was and still is annoying. Misspellings or incorrect naming of runtime folders should be caught by the beta testers during testing but isn't always. Q and A should definitely catch it if it's missed in testing. I've done a lot of beta testing over the years. Besides actually making sure everything functions as it should, the vendors I tested for expected me to review the read me and check folder set up and path names.
Let me rephrase my original question;
What can customers do to encourage a more sensible file structure? Do we need to offer to pay more money? I am seriously ready to pay twice as much for a product that is responsibly structured. If you are a content creator who has structured their files sensibly., please include it in the description. I will buy it even if I don't need it.
The key word here is 'sensible'. This topic has come up innumerable times over the years, and the one thing every poster has in common is that they all think their system is 'sensible'. Unfortunately, every single person likes a different system. So the fact that you think something is sensible, doesn't mean everyone else will. (I'm not picking on you. I'm sure many people wouldn't like my system either).
What DAZ have done by encouraging PAs to use so-called 'vanity' folders is to choose the least of several evils. It may not be the perfect system for everyone, but it is workable. And if the majority of PAs use it, it becomes standardised for most items in the store.
The real problem isn't the system DAZ choose, (because no matter what one they choose, someone won't like it). It's the weird and wonderful exceptions, mistakes and other glitches that appear. When you have over 300 PAs making products and these products range over a time span of 13 years, it's inevitable that errors will appear.
mac
Actually Mac, Poser will be 20 years old this year (Fractal Poser was released in 1994) so I supposed the oddities go back even further.
The term sensible file structure keeps being bandied about. What, to the users who don't see the current file structure as sensible, do they see as sensible?
Rather than just keep making nebulous demands for a "sensible file structure", give a clear cut example of what is viewed as a sensible file structure.
Yes, you're right. I was talking specifically about the DAZ store and products, which go back 13 years. I was the 12th PA to join DAZ, in June, 2001.
mac
Yes, you're right. I was talking specifically about the DAZ store and products, which go back 13 years. I was the 12th PA to join DAZ, in June, 2001.
mac
The 12th? So this past year was your 12th year as the 12th vendor? Sounds like some kind of a weird movie title...just kidding.
Does this mean it's all Larry's fault? (Nah)
The 12th? So this past year was your 12th year as the 12th vendor? Sounds like some kind of a weird movie title...just kidding.
Does this mean it's all Larry's fault? (Nah)
That's just gross...
The 12th? So this past year was your 12th year as the 12th vendor? Sounds like some kind of a weird movie title...just kidding.
Does this mean it's all Larry's fault? (Nah)
That's just gross...
What's gross? Mac being the 12th vendor (sorry Mac but I couldn't resist) or the weird movie title thing? Or blaming Larry Weinberg (for those who don't know he invented Poser) for the messed up naming conventions?
That's just gross...
What's gross? Mac being the 12th vendor (sorry Mac but I couldn't resist) or the weird movie title thing? Or blaming Larry Weinberg (for those who don't know he invented Poser) for the messed up naming conventions?
12 x 12...144 = 1 gross....
Yep, I stayed up too late celebrating, last night...
I must be one of the few that like the so-called vanity folders. I just get frustrated when a PA sometimes uses them and sometimes doesn't. I remember the names of most of my favorite artists, so if I can go straight to a "Luthbel" folder and find all of his outfits, that's great. But I run into plenty of situations where 2/3 of the products are put into a PA specific folder and then the rest are scattered about by the outfit/hair/character name. Or the vendor suddenly gets the crazy idea to put a "!" in front of their name, sometimes with a space after the exclamation mark and sometimes not. In fact that very thing just happened to me yesterday with one of my favorite character vendors. I had to go read the "readme" in order to find out what she'd changed her folder location to. This after creating dozens of characters stored in a folder with her name. Grrrrr.
Never mind. Stupid forum. I thought they we were getting new ones.
"I would suggest that some grunt help with the naming conventions - not the actual content creator."
If only we had grunts around to do anything. The majority of us are one person operations so there is no one to run around behind us and tidy up as we fling along through our work. And the reality is that PA's by and large are creatives and not necessarily the best at clerical work. The details that get focused on are the details that make the product work, or render properly, or look realistic rather than trying to remember how we named a texture file in the past. Personally, if I can maintain a standard naming convention within a product for the texture files I consider it a win.
I would like to state that I do not, and never have.............
used ! in any folder or file.
12+12=gross
Ouch! LOL.
mac
PS I've been here 12 yrs 6 months, and I rounded it off to 13 for DAZ as a store.
Which is why DAZ should be checking these details during their screening process.
And / or formalize naming conventions in some manner.
Personally, I don't care about the technical directories. I only care about the user facing directories.
That's the whole reason for things like the CMS...so the user can arrange things to their own liking, regardless of what the actual file structure behind it is. Seriously, does everything need to be in some sort of rigid structure that nobody can change or does it just have to LOOK like it is? (substitute logical for rigid, if you prefer)
If you want to change a texture the Browse function under that particular surface will take you to the exact folder it's in...so what's the real problem?
I have 3,700 packages that I have purchased from DAZ. It has taken me the better part of three months to sort through all of it. And I am still not done. I'm just done enough that I don't think I will worry about the rest.
CMS errors have happened repeatedly. Forcing multiple uninstalls, re-installs and deletions of the databases. Luckily I have made often exports of User Data so I've only lost an hour or two of work. But the general instability of it does not fill me with confidence that this is a permanent solution.
(For example, I had to re-import User Data last night after another CMS crash. It took 45 minutes to complete.)
In addition, the Content tab is not really user friendly in terms of doing this organization. It is slow, clunky and requires items to be organized one at a time. There is no search function or mass move command.
I fail to understand why there is so much protest from PAs here, even for simple things like doing a cursory spell check. Yet almost none of the items I have purchased from Renderosity have such issues. So evidently it is possible.
Here's another thought that occurred to me after I posted my last message...
It's in both DAZ's and PAs best interests to make these files as easy to locate as possible.
We, regulars here, PAs, and DAZ, loose sight of the trees for the forest. We are so use to using the software that we basically know where to find things. We know where to look for the most part. We are experienced enough to know where things should be, how the should work, even if the situation isn't optimal.
New users do not have that crutch. They are already dealing with a steep learning curve. A new user has to be extremely, extremely motivated in order to get their footing. Making things more difficult has the potential to loose future customers.
I know this from personal experience from four different people who were interested, but just gave up. No manner of coaxing was going to get them back.
We were all new users once. DAZ doesn't have a steep learning curve compared to some apps. DAZ has done it's level best to make it as simple and painless as possible. Even going so far as making Ready to Render scenes. Buy the items in the RTR scene install them and go.
Many have posted here about having to search for files, are you installing the files manually, making certain the files install to the correct folders or are you just letting the DIM do it?
If you let the DIM do all the work and then have to chase after files, it sounds like the problem lies with the Installation Manager and not necessarily with the files themselves.
If you will point me in the direction of a free spell checker that does file names and so forth I would be more than happy to use it. So far none of my spell checkers do files.
And what good will spell check do when spelling varies even between countries whose native language is English? And how do you spell check all the weird phonetic spellings of products these days?
Color - colour
Theater - theatre
Etcetera etcetera... not to mention foreign language versions of the program that might be used by freebie makers at Rendo or other sites...
Educated Americans and Brits are well aware of the few spelling differences between their languages, Consistent and meaningful names is all I crave. I like to have the Product name as listed in the DAZ store follow be the content creator's tag. That way if Art collab changes their name slightly over time, it won't affect the list order. But, I can still look up the product details in the store. DIM has helped. If I can figure out part the product name from the directory, I can search in DIM, then click on installed files to find out where they are. Or I can click on the info to get to the readme in the store. All this is not intuitive to a newbie.
I am sure some form of standards is something we all would want.
But the reality of it is that it isnt going to happen.
There are far too many independent variables to get everything working together...plus there are already thousands of products in the store that would not use the new system (and would likely never get updated to it)....so it just wont happen.
If you go back to my previous posts you will see instances where PAs have misspelled THEIR OWN PA NAME.
I am not talking rocket science here. Just basic error checking.
Everything starts somewhere. Resignation of "this is the way its always been" is never a good reason to not do something.
Here's the problem, and it's been said before:
You will not GET consistancy because everyone thinks their way is best. This is a bunch of self employed individuals with a few working directly for a company, not a single monolithic business. While DAZ can require one thing, Rendo and RDNA and Hivewire and everyone else, and even the individual merchants there, will do things how THEY want to do it.