Smart content bug
Damsel
Posts: 391
One of the things that's my biggest iritation with Daz Studio Smart Content is out of any group of products I order, a significant chunk of them will end up like the attached image. That is, empty icons. They appear to download, but if you try to use the product, such as this hair, it will give you this error: 019-12-28 13:49:26.755 C:/Users/Julie/Documents/DAZ 3D/Studio/My Daz Connect Library/data/cloud/1_66177/people/genesis 8 male/hair/lennie hair/lennie hair.duf (1,1): Syntax error - expected '{' or '['
2019-12-28 13:49:26.755 Error reading file, see log for more details.
If it were one or two files, that would be different. But I get this problem a LOT. I order a lot of products, and I use a lot of products, and it's ANNOYING. I have to manually download the product with DIM.
Which is what I'm going to do with this one.
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Comments
I get that occasionally. As far as I can tell it's a failure to decrypt the files from the server as Connect installs them, so the fles are there but DS can't parse the DSON files and the images can't show as tumbnails or be applied as textures, nor will they open in an image editor. Daz usaully don't have the issue, when I report it, which makes it hard to fix. There is a work-around, uninstall the Connect version and use the Install Manager route instead. In my case the files usually resolve OK at a later date (with a fresh install).
I get these a lot too but I only use DIM. It happens after an update most of the time. Files get moved and renamed in the update but the blank links to the old files remain in smart content for some reason. I figured out how to remove them but I can't recall the steps right off hand.
Eek. Okay. Thanks, I guess.
The authors need to adapt the script to work with Connect - there is a sample script showing what needs to be done to call an external file regardless of isntallation method (and I can confirm that it works, having used the code to replace a broken read me launcher) http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/file_io/file_find/start
Understood. But some authors of recent products are still not doing that, even after Daz Connect has been around for a long time now. I don't believe QA does any testing for Daz Connect compatibility. Daz Connect installers are offered automatically, it seems, until hapless users experience problems with the product and tell CS that it doesn't work with Daz Connect.
I've often been tempted to uninstall everything I've installed with Daz Connect and start over with DIM, but that would be a huge task. I keep expecting Daz Connect to mature and be maintained and improved, but I'm losing hope.
When checking up on a Daz Connect bug report I submitted 3 years ago, I was told it has not been fixed. I started using Daz Connect, because we were told that products would be encrypted and Daz Connect would be the only way to install them, DIM might eventually go away, metadata updates might only be delivered with Daz Connect and not DIM. What actually happened is that encryption was dropped with no explanation and DIM lives on. I like the visual thumbnail and Installation pane for Daz Connect, but beyond that, I find little to recommend it. I have not experienced any great speed improvement over DIM download. The fact that Daz Connect is corrupting more and more products these days makes it a really bad choice I think.