Can we commission SickleYield to write DAZ Studio scripting docs?
Alley Rat
Posts: 405
What it says on the tin. If available and willing, I'd gladly contribute to a GoFundMe for this. Scripting documentation is one of the few areas Poser still has over DS, and PoserPython is still a nightmare to use. I don't mean for this post to sound combative or negative, but there are a lot of things I'd love to be doing in DS if I could only understand it better. Things that were possible in Poser (with great effort), that I feel like would be a cinch in DS if I only knew the commands.
Thanks!
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https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-4-5-sdk
Are you a C++ coder already? are you familiar with doxygen?
I'm not saying the docs are the best ever but they're not the worst I've ever seen.
Bear in mind that, while SickleYield and co. have produced some excellent scripts, they are not necessarily also blessed with the skills for techincal documentation. Also bear in mind that creating the documentation requires a lot of knowledge of the way DS works - more, generally, than would be needed to write specific scripts. Rob has already devoted a great deal of his own time to providing us with the documentation - which I fnd usually answers the questions I have, and when it doesn't that's often down to my ignorance of certain vital parts of the pcture (DS-specific or more generally script-related).
Instead of a blog, Daz really needs to create comprehensive manual with screenshots that include DS's advanced and almost hidden capabilities. It seems Daz is focusing more on marketing to new users but these new users will quickly get frustrated with the lack of documentation. That's why it took me a long time to switch from Poser to DS and now that Poser is resurfacing I think it would be worth the effort for Daz to create a manual, even if it's expensive and sold on Amazon. If a manual like that was on Amazon it would also attract new users who would find it by Amazon's suggestions whenever they searched for 3D. I've been suggesting this ever since I started using DS in 2016 and I still don't know how to use DS's advanced capabilities like how to create separate sliders for head and body morphs, create sliders for expressions created in Power Pose and sooo much more!
I am an experienced C++ developer (> 20 years), working in UI and graphics. I was intending to make a plugin using the SDK. The trouble with it is there's very little "support" (people around to answer your API questions) and the documents are bare-bones. Scripting isn't much better but at least there you have plenty of examples from, for example, mcasual. So you can piece together some interesting things if you spend the time to study his scripts. I think as a developer what you need to be productive, even with technologies you haven't much experience with, is a thriving community of other people. If there are only one or two who're doing it at any one time, it's an excercise in frustration.
To be fair, we do have SOME benchmark for how SY would do at technical documentation, since she’s already made a number of tutorials.
This is what made me think of her. I used to program, but have let those skills lapse in favor of technical writing. My technical writing gets pirated less than my programs, plus it reaches so many more people.
I haven't done production coding since you were starting out but that wasn't how things were then. I'd get API's all the time with next to no documentation and have to try stuff out till I got things working, I remember quite clearly spending the whole summer of 2002 or 2003 trying to get the eBay API to do what I needed. That one did have a forum, hosted by eBay obviously, but it was on some PoS software that made following threads impossible and had no usable search. IIRC I wrote the UI in about a week, in ASP/C#, another couple of days getting the DB and DB code done. Then like 10 weeks trying to pull the data out of eBay.
Different questio: Do you think Sickleyield will WANT to sit down for weeks writing that scripting documentation?
She has been extremely helpful already, and it's obvious that she does like helping people when she has time. However, writing documentation is extremely tedious and boring. Doing that for several weeks is quite different from spending a few hours a week to explain something. I could really imagine her going nuts and her creative mindset screaming to get out after just a few days already..
Documentation in Daz is bad overall. While that's frustrating to the user, it is also something to be expected in my opinion. Simply because it is a frustratingly boring job, and about any developer gladly picks bug fixing over documentation writing..
I would suspect weeks was optimstic
I'll second this. The documentation is about 8 versions behind. I think the current manual is for 4.4 or 4.5 and we're at 4.12.
I'm guessing here but I don't think SY does any programing or scripting, I think RiverSoft Art does it all, and SY just directs him and leads technical support. Sorry if I'm wrong !
Yes, I do all the scripting with our products (and the manuals). IMO, I find the scripting documentation (I don't know about the C++ docs) to be pretty decent:
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/start
Between the Samples and the Object Index (which is where I live, that web page is ALWAYS up in my browser), I can usually figure most things out. What it lacks is the overarching structure of how things work together.
I appreciate the thought, but I would go insane writing docs
. I force myself to write what I hope are good manuals but it is definitely not my passion.
Let's face it, no-one likes writing documentation. It's a horrible, soul-sucking chore. So thanks to all those PAs and DAZ staff who provide decent, half-decent or, sometimes, excellent documentation - and thank all the gods for those kind people who provide us with advice, guidance and tutorials!
Interesting. The documentation centre requires a login, and won't accept my forum & shop login. Got as far as here: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/script_ide/start, and cannot get further because a login is needed.
So, accessible documention would be quite nice.
Richard
Just tried it. Works for me. I didn't have to log in.
Me, as well, I've never had to log in.
The log in, which iss eparate from the store/forum system by design, is for editing pages. The page you link to is for the editor, the ScriptIDE pane, which has been receiving some work that is not yet in the General Release build (I think it is, at least in part, in the Public Build but I haven't done much scripting recently) and so the docs may be incomplete, and may be ebing held back to avoid confusion while they don't apply to the General Release. The dcos for the scripting itself are at the link RiverSoftArt gave.
My apologies for the misattribution, and THANK YOU SO MUCH for the work you've already done, and for the link to the docs.
APIs were a lot simpler 20 years ago and the things we were doing with them were a lot less sophisticated. I have absolutely no intention of pillocking around for weeks or months on a project making little to no progress. Life is too short!
I really should get into Daz scripting. I do a lot at work, but not in anything that resembles this. On one customer project, I used Tcl, Perl, Csh and Bash. When I was done, I mentioned that and asked "Got anything else?"
No problem at all! And you are welcome.
I've been doing computer documentation for 30+ years. It's just an unpaid hobby of mine. I've noticed most programmers don't appear to be skilled at writing docs. I think some people have certain skills, while others have different skills.
When DS updates to the new QT will there be any changes ?
No idea, ask SickleYield.
Perhaps setup a kickstarter to see what sort of interest (those interested to pay) there is for said docs. You would need to know from SickleYield (and/or whoever takes it on), what their minimum is and what they would do at various stages if you raised more.
I did some scripting in order to understand, how G3 works, when 4.8 was out. Unfortunately the documentation is really outdated in some areas and it was quite cumbersome to find out, how I can go through the hierarchy of a character and get the pose data and ERC information. My goal was to get a character to Cinema 4D and pose it there similar to Daz Studio, but FBX doesn't send over all needed information, especially the dependencies between joints and morphs. Manually it worked fine. Unfortunately I do not have enough time at the moment to dig deeper into that.
Nevertheless and update on the documentaion would be nice.
What was outdated? If you were using the version on the wiki, not the zipped up DS 3 scripting docs (though those do have some useful overview stuff, as I recall) then I think most things are reasonably current with the release version - there are of course chnages in the beta whch may well be deliberately undocumented until it becomes a general release.
Did anybody ever figure out how to save the scripting docs web page chain (or any of the web page documentation really) as an offline reference?
Actually, I enjoy it.
But my sense of humor is incompatible with DAZ's, and I have two writing projects in the pipeline that will pay a lot better.
I don't mind doing it either, if it pays well enough.