You've been heard. Response re: 4.9 and Encryption
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You don't need Connect for this - just standardized format for metadata, but this didn't happen as for now and not likely to be in the future.
I didn't mention it because it's the past. Those were .daz files, they were binary and also had encryption option but I usually hacked .cr2 and .pz3 that time :)
And I doubt You want to be merely "average user". :)
For me the toll booth is a pass for several reasons
1 encrypted (even though it is free, so minor issue, if I had to pay money for it, then major issue if encrypted)
2 have zero use for a toll booth ..that was the killer
The toll booth is no longer encrypted, and from what we have been told, never should have been. However none of that helps your reason 2!
This is incorrrect. Connect does not log in automatically, it's only on when you choose to login and you can log out at any time with one click.
I realise that. It does in some way perform a hand-shake of some kind, otherwise it couldn't then log me in. But I know I'm paranoid, so realise some of what occurs to me is, lets say, out-there.
As does DIM, or logging in with a browser.
DAZ connect is the distribution system with the benefit that it shows both installed and uninstalled products.
Metadata includes just the categories. Products of other stores are currently not uploaded on the DAZ connect server so you will not see uninstalled products from other stores in DAZ Studio "all" or "available" tabs.
Example:
You open up DAZ Studio and browse to the category wardrobe/shirts in the Smart Content Tab.
Currently with DAZ Studio 4.9 you can see all installed and uninstalled products you purchased at DAZ3D.
You can also see those products with metadata from other stores that are installed.
Now imagine in the same spot all products you purchased in other stores that include shirts would show up in the same place no matter if they are installed or not.
Currently you cannot right click uninstalled products of others stores directly in the DAZ Studio Smart content tab and download and install them because the other stores have not uploaded any products to the DAZ Connect Servers.
- - -
Just because something did not happen in the past does not mean that it must stay the same.
Allready in the first metadata products of 2011 there was the option to add a store identifier to the metadata.
And some vendors in other stores did make an effort of adding categories to their products.
Therefore it could very well be that some 3rd party stores or vendors might actually be interested to upload their products on the DAZ connect server so their customers could download them directly inside DAZ Studio as well.
But probably it is a bit too early in the development cycle now and all the issues have to be sorted out before involving even more people...
Anyway the reason why I brought this up is that I was under the impression that it does not have to be "X VS Y" but they could all find a way to work together if that makes sense for them from a business perspective.
I wonder if those files aren't so much encrypted as compressed. And thus can be uncompressed. I do note that I'm not able to use products with .daz files that have been installed through connect. Which given that they're useful products from some notable PAs kinda bothers me, but I put a ticket in on that. Also I should be able to save the assets out in nice unencrypted .dufs I believe. If I can make them open. I think when I poked at them for the sake of being able to add some of my troubleshooting to the ticket, I was able to get them to open by setting the product folder as a base runtime for DAZ Studio content in the content pane. But as this affects several products, that's not an ideal solution. I suppose if I just copied them to my normal library it'd likely find them. It just seems whatever Connect is using to let products find their resources is not working for these particular products with that filetype.
But the point is compression is not the same thing. While a compressed file can be encrypted, and isn't readable plaintext, an non-encrypted compressed file can be uncompressed and read as normal. Just having a proprietary format isn't the same as having an encryption locked one. For a good example, I'll point to gaming. Most games use files that are specific to that game. But they're not encrypted to a specific user. So tools made to modify game files can be worked on by multiple people, who can puzzle out how to edit the files, and make mods that will work for others. And some games do encrypt their files or use compression methods not commonly available in order to prevent modification. The difference is, games are presented as something we're meant to use in the form the creators intended. Do you really want your 3d artistic content to be like that? People do wonderful creative things with content all the time through a variety of methods, including direct editing of the files. Locking the files to encrypted formats is pretty much demanding that we only color within the lines with the products.
To the original post quoted: Just because you don't edit .duf files often doesn't mean there aren't users who do. And I'm sure if they encountered the compressed/binary ones, they saved them in a non-binary uncompressed form and went to editing.
And you shouldn't try to claim that all export options are the same when Daz has outright stated that Cararra's normal ability to read .dufs and the DSON plugin for Poser users do not work with encrypted content at this time. That's two options down, and the others are stated as being 'less than' what the product was originally. Which is how they had been, but now with less chance some bright person could write a plugin or converter to handle carrying over more functionality into other software.
No way around it, DRM encryption cripples the products it's used on in order to lock them down. Maybe you don't need the lost functionality. Maybe most users don't. But there are people who relied on it to do their work with this software, and there's always the possibility of others running into a situation where such access could be useful only to have it denied.
It's not just a distribution system or installation managment system - money is involved and in these circumstances I see it's very unlikely that stores will come to agreement. Look, they didn't produce such simple thing as common XML format for metadata in all those years and common use of Connect will require agreements on profit distribution, advertizing, how to deel with PAs who sell in different stores etc. Years of existence of DIM didn't convince any other store to support it.
And to my taste applications must do what they do best and not to try be 'jack of many trades'.
Of course, but I use DIM, then close it down; it's on for about five minutes as I have a fast connection. My browser, well that's a whole other story. I stick with firefox as I trust it more - the source code for example gets peer-reviewed. If I could get Daz working properly in Linux, I wouldn't be using Windows either - especially Windows 10; have you seen the EULA? But not related to this thread. I'm tech-savvy, which probably contributes to my paranoia. :)
You can tell DS to store your log-in, but it's optional. If it doesn't store your log-in and isn't logged in then it knows nothing about your account at Daz and isn't comminicating with Daz (unless you opted in to the improvement programme).
My understanding is that .daz files are mostly used for dynamic clothing products. I believe they are not encrypted, but they do use a completely undocument binary format, and the reason the spec is kept secret is so that people do not make their own dynamic clothing. This should only be done with an app from Optitex, a product, I believe, that costs 10s of thousands of dollars, and just a single DAZ PA has access to. Hence the rather small amount of dynamic clothing available in the store.
.daz files wasn't compressed, they were just binary files containing different protions of scene info - geometry, UVs. morphs. Roughly like modern .dsf/.duf. There also was option to encrypt them (AFAIR right in the Save as... dialog).
They were used to live in /data folder of the runtime and were dependent on their relative position, so if You can manage to move them into right places the product should start to work again :)
Actually what matters here is ability to work with content legally. id Software's Quake IV has many game data in readable plain text format (zipped in pack files) but they're still proprietary and they specifically allowed to modify them for limited set of modding purposes (before the engine was GPLed). On the other hand, DSON was invented and promoted as 'open' file format - you freely may produce yout own .duf/.dsf files and modify what you've got from stores (as far as EULA lets you :) ). Encryption gets it away from me, that's why I bother.
I could imagine script or plugin that walks through the scene tree and produces plain text DSON and writes it to the file. ... and then we'll get SDK with file write functions locked, like in Houdini, for example :)
+1
Wouldn't the easiest solution for those who want to edit their dufs be either some "texteditor" function out of the box (DS native) or as free a plugin (as i can imagine that the majority of users will not have a desire to look into their dufs...)? That way, people could still edit, presumably even save the content of the duf out as text format, and do their editing/studying, while the files itself would still be encrypted. It would also add functionalty to DS, also for non-encrypted content.
As utoptian as the idea of a unified market sounds, the realistic concern is who would dictate terms for that market. Connect as the de facto platform for the market would be an absolute disaster. Even if Daz didn't force controls on other markets to be allowed onboard, the idea that DAZ could simply cut the others off on a whim would have a seriously negative effect on the other stores. Plus it could hardly be in Daz's interest to promote other stores. I'm not even an economist and I can see that it wouldn't work. Plus trying to manage artists is like herding cats. Trying to manage several herds of cats is just insanity.
Wouldn't know about the dynamic clothing. I'm talking about stuff like Stonemason's Urban Sprawl 2. (A lovely set to be sure, but concrete and stone are rarely dynamic. Though it'd be funny to watch a dynamics simultation where it was turned to cloth and buildings all fell into a pile...)
I'm paranoid, so take a guess.
Does it store login data or not?
Only if you tell it to - there's a Remember me check box, which is off by default.
Sounds better! Thank you!
Oh sure, I love the community. Just not happy about DRM and other stuff. I do hold out hope that DRM will be a miserable failure and Daz will announce some face-saving 'we are moving in a new direction' and quietly retire it. If my cancelation can be part of any larger message of 'no, this stinks, please stop,' then it's worth it.
PC+ IS a good value, if you can figure out how to apply the coupons. And I do have an extensive wishlist.
But there's only a dozen or so things that I feel I _NEED_ that I can only find here, rather than the much longer list of stuff that would be cool. By the time my account expires I should get those things and then I'll be done.
Like most such things, there's a 'remember me' option that would store data. Hopefully in a encrypted form for our safety. If you uncheck that, it shouldn't save anything. It didn't when I tested it a minute ago. (Unchecked, logged in, work offline, login again - no username or password filled in.)
.daz was the scene format in DS 0-3, and was used in the early betas of 4. Dynamic Clothing tends to be in that format as it is mostly older, though it is in a proprietary form as far as I am aware however it is delivered (as are other features such as the two strand hair plug-ins).
Yes, but good text editor/IDE for Qt is the story of it's own :) - maybe Qt Creator may be appropriately licensed, I just cannot guess.
I think the issue would be that it would negate the 'benefit' of the DRM encryption. Namely preventing the export of the .duf in a potentially usable format. While such a plugin would be handy for non-encrypted content, if it covered encrypted then it would have to have blocks to prevent any possibility of someone getting the text out of the program, because if you get the raw text of an encrypted file and change the extension to .duf, you've got an unencrypted version with all the functionality the encryption was protecting.
I'm glad I came in here late and missed most of the hubbub with the toll booth, because I'd probably blown another set of fuses. After all it's a useful little goodie, and being deprived of that one would've annoyed me just as much as I was annoyed when the PC freebie for November was cancelled. Now I just thought it a bit of an irony that it was a TOLL BOTH that caused all this annoyance. And I can spend time being annoyed with yet another complicated sale instead.
With that said I really hope DAZ will listen as in LISTEN and not as in "listen". Otherwise I fear a slow degradation to more and more encrypted materials on the site, and with that at least I too will be heading in another direction. Just as I refused to buy copy protected CDs back in the days until I learned how to get around that obstacle. Because, as someone said, I don't want to be regarded as a thief just for shopping here, and I don't want to end up in a situation should DAZ go bankrupt and someone else acquires the crypto keys and decide to charge me again for something I already bought. Or everything else which can go wrong when you don't have full access to your goods.
Which is what DAZ_Steve's opening post was about - ensuring that in that event the tool to decrypt the content would be made available.
There is already a text editor in DS. I don't think it can read encrypted files though...
Just imagined: right click on node in Scene pane or on parameter in Parameters or directly in the Viewport and there is an action in context menu - 'Edit this...', you select it and editor opens with proper .dsf loaded, cursor is on selected element, syntax highliting, indentation, context assistance etc. You make changes and hit 'Hot reload' button and scene changes accordingly...
Definitely, I'd kill for this feature. :)
DRM means we can no longer fix issues in e.g. .duf files, wich means we have to rely on DAZ's virtually non-existent tech support. If this is a hobby, mayber that's liveable, but if it's an important asset in a business effort it's not. It also raises the question of what will DAZ do next, and not in a good way. DRM is at best is transparent to the user but more imprtantly at worst denies the user access to the product. That's a new risk that has been introduced. If I am planning on working on a two year effort to make a game (maybe longer say based on kickstarter efforts, the inevitable delays, etc.), what will the DAZ landscape look like in a year from now? In two? Ditto for other bussiness eforts that rela heavily on the content. The bottom line is do you want to work with the company that is trying to force DRM onto its customers or with companies that are not? All else being equal, the answer is obvious. From a "minimizing your risk" business standpoint, the only reason to ship at DAZ today is if they are the only ones that have the content that you need, whereas pre-DRM, it was a great store to shop at overall.