No encrypted for me.
This discussion has been closed.
Adding to Cart…
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.You currently have no notifications.
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
That's fair enough, and if people don't feel comfortable with this, they certainly don't have to use it. I only started speaking up in this thread because I really think some people are panicking and spreading misinformation over something that isn't going to affect most customers in any real way.
The fact that has been a lot of misinformation and poorly considered speculation in this thread is something I think we can all agree on, the fact that this is an issue of concern, is clearly not something we agree on
Alright, then please explain why, in simple terms and with as little Chicken Little-esque "they're punishing paying customers!!1" claims as possible, how encryption and DRM will hurt us. We can still access the OBJs and textures, we can still export to other software, we have to download the products at least once to get them to begin with, and there is a method (perhaps a bit of work, but it's there) to get content working on a computer than has no internet access. I'm not mocking you, I'd honestly like to hear a real reason that doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory coming from the same group of people who complain about everything DAZ does anyway.
One of the biggest issues with the encryption is that it removes the ability to make changes in the asset on certain levels. This ability comes in handy at many different times but most often when a "buggy" asset is released. The content creators are human. This has happened before and will most likely happen again. I am not criticising anyone with this statement. Its just something that "is" People are not perfect.
Another thing is that even though an asset may be able to be exported as another file type, those exports are often not 'perfect" and generally dont give you full functionality of the figure as it was created. This has long been an issue but as I understand it, the difficulty is increased now with the encryption. This facet is something that perhaps another user here on these forums may be able to answer in a more detailed fashion than I can as I have just started to learn to use other 3D programs.
Another concern with the DRM is the possibility of failures in the activation/authentification scheme. This has happened with bigger and more staffed companies than DAZ3D when they encrypted their products. Its a very real concern especially given the fact that many of the people that shop at DAZ3D use their assets professionally. An example of this would be something that happened with Adobe when they took their packages to a subscription based DRM scheme that required periodic authentification. Their authentification servers failed. People - including professional graphic artists- could not access their legally acquired software for several days while this was sorted out. Magazine artists missed deadlines. People that design various art and video for books , movies, tv shows and such failed to meet deadlines costing other companies lots of money.
A further concern with encryption based DRM is what happens if DAZ3D goes out of business. Yes, there has been mention of a "poison pill" method to de- encrypt our content but the mentions have been contradictory with one DAZ employee stating that it was already developed and later on in the game another DAZ employee saying that it was "being looked into". No company is immune to the possibility of going out of business. The market shifts, people make bad decisions, fads and trends change. Its just part of life and business.
And finally, ( though you may consider this chicken little-ish ) there is the very real possibility that this is the first step if you will on the way to putting all of DAZ's customers into a "walled garden". By this I mean that the only place we could use our encrypted DAZ3D content is within DAZ Studio itself. This stifles the creativity and freedom of choice for everyone and that is never a good thing. Yes, I know that it has been said by employees of DAZ 3D that this is not in the works but they are the same people that said there were "no plans for encrypted connect only content in the forseeable future" and since we saw encrypted content on the very first day that 4.9 was "live" we all know how far that worked out. Other companies have done exactly this same thing before and attempted to lock their users into a walled garden. Apple and Microsoft and Adobe, are three that come to mind immediately. It did not work out well for them and it most likely won't work out well for DAZ. This is not "chicken little" it's examples out of past history.
There is a lot of distrust of anything coming out of DAZ3D right now and its not from people that are the onees that always complain. A lot of this appears to be from people that have been loyal customers for quite a long time. People who have loyalty and an emotional connection to the company. That is NEVER a good thing because people know they have been around for a while and will follow their lead much more readily than "new" people OR employees of the company especially when there has been as much flip-flopping on "official "statements as there has been with this product release. This is going very badly and the fault of that lies mostly on DAZ3D.
I do hope I have answered your questions at least in part.
There have been several examples of how this hurts legit users throughout this thread. But let me reiterate a couple.
If there's an error in a plaintext .duf, I can go in and edit it myself if I choose rather than waiting on a ticket process. This is impossible in an encrypted .duf
If I wish to relocate parts of a product to suit whatever setup I'm running, I can do so. Not so with encrypted products which must remain where they install to as I can't simply rewrite where they look for components.
This isn't even touching on things DAZ could choose to add in order to sell DRM. We already have a half dozen items that were DRMed solely to sell everyone on it. They could do more to lock things down and if we sit back and take it, then we deserve the walled garden.
Speculation occurs when there is a lack of official information... And I am sorry, random messages in a forum that has no search function is not an efficient form of official communication.
If information was being communicated properly, I wouldnt have been paniking and cancelling 4.9 from starting when I saw "Migrating xxx of 124,632 files" happening immediately at start up.
Yeah.. that would have had me in a panic too.
I am going to guess that most of the people here don't remember the early days of DRM. And how painful they were...
Like Bard's Tale having you "enter word 4 from sentence 7 on page 23" and then you realize your buddy borrowed the book without telling you.
Or Infocom's "turn the the inner dial to..." and "line up the outer dial with" and enter the number. And finding out that someone in your family used the cardboard disk as a coaster and melted it?
And for one more example, Electronic Art's "you must create a save disk to play." And then randomly asking for the save disk to be inserted into the floppy drive for confirmation of who you are.
When you are burned by one of those, often without ever being able to unlock the game again, you get extremely wary of DRM.
The thing is, the people who communicate 'this isn't what Daz intends' aren't usually the people who are actually making the decisions, and there are good reasons the decision-makers aren't telling people stuff.
And, well, things change. People change their mind.
None of this is bad or evil, but to expect people to be calmed by words of 'we have no plans' is silly. Is Daz planning a walled garden? Who knows. Might they decide to move further that way? Who knows.
What we DO know is that DRM clears the weeds, to flog the analogy, in that direction.
Thanks to those who are explaining encryption. :-) I know very little about it.
As for the embedded watermark, I wondered if something like that was possible. It'd zero in on who is doing what with the content -- using it in the wrong way, I mean.
Dont confuse DRM for encryption; DRM uses encryption, but other tools on the internet also use encryption; you are likely aware of the https (indication a safe connection) which is used for passing private personal data, which is done by encryption. This is without any risk of the customer being tempoarily or permenantly locked out. That is often a result of issues with the company and its servers becoming unavailable or the company cancelling/stopping a service that uses DRM.
Encrypted is pretty much a no-go for Carrara users.
Unfortunately, for all Carrara users, DAZ3D has once again told us through their actions, that we don't matter to them (which is probably true because I'm sure now that we are a very small portion of their overall sales). We still can't use any G3 products in Carrara, and have no Idea when (or at this point if) they will have the update available. In addition, we now have G3 content that will be totally unusable in Carrara when (if) the update is released thanks to Lynsey, Dragon Queen, and the Lulu Outfit for G3F being connect encrypted only, as well as other content like the Troubador for G2F that is not usable in Carrara because of encryption. Yes, for items like the Medieval Storage Room, we can export it from DS and use it in Carrara. But IMHO that is a real PITA and huge step backwards. This is yet another slap in the face for Carrara users (intentional or not, that is the result). If DAZ3D plans on dropping future content support for Carrara, the proper thing to do would be to let your users, and potential users know.
Being able to move forward knowing that Carrara is either going to be supported as a full member of the DAZ content "family", or basically be pushed aside and ignored would be a huge plus. As it is now, Carrara users are just playing a guessing game. which seems as if the only sure win to this game is to move on to another software. Unfortunately there isn't another software available that provides the features of Carrara, and integration of DAZ content, so even by moving on Carrara users end up losing something, features if we go with DS or Poser, integrated pre-made content if we use something else.
While I realize that Carrara users are seen as not being DS content users, I just did a total, and I have spent a little over $700 on content here in the last year (much more than I had realized
). True, compared to many that is not a lot, but for me it is a very significant amount, and makes me realize that my annual spending is getting closer to being able to afford something better than Carrara (or go with Blender and save A LOT). Seriously though, we do buy a lot of DS content for use in Carrara,
I tried to use it. I just couldn't connect to my account, no matter what. DAZ tech support couldn't help me connect. I CAN connect to DAZ Connect, so I like it better than DIM.
Doesn't mean I'm FOR the encryption thing though -- actually I don't know enough about DRM to offer an intelligent opinion. Just hoping for the sake of all that another solution can be found. I like harmony.
Plus, customer exodus might lead to price hikes.
Customer exodus WILL lead to price hikes and if too many customers leave, DAZ won't be in good fiscal shape
Ok -- well, obviously I know less about DRM than I think. :-) Thanks for the info.
The thing is, your post says you don't like it; but getting the encrypted only content says you do. Daz listens to sales, not posts.
Oh don't worry, I'm definitely going to be voting with my wallet — if the free encrypted content doesn't give me the creative freedom I need, I certainly won't be buying any Encrypted DAZ Connect products in the future.
Issues with DRM:
1) Upgrade hardware (or drivers in some cases) and risk locking yourself out of your software because your new configuration doesn't match what the software expected. Oh, hey, you're out of license keys and it's the weekend so you can't get your stuff unlocked by customer service until Monday. And that's assuming customer service believes you and resets your # of available keys.
2) You *have to* put each computer online to get a key for that machine. Not everyone can do that for various reasons.
3) With software keys, you're at the mercy of the company as to how many you have at a time. DAZ said they haven't figured out how many keys each person can have. They could easily limit it to just 1 or 2 machines, so no render farms.
4) You can't modify or fix files. Products aren't always fixed in a timely manner (or at all).
5) If the software key gets corrupted I hope you're not on a machine or in a location with no Internet access.
I see several edge case possibilities on top of what I listed above, but since I haven't had time to test them, I won't list them. On top of the encryption aspect, DAZ Connect causes several problems for me (worse than DIM). If they go to DC only I won't be a customer here any longer.
So, I got the Daz connect freebies, I figured why not, can't install them until I get internet but was wondering if there is a reason to download the offline files for all my past products or will it not make a difference either way? I'm not against Daz Connect, I'm actually thankful they made an offline option, I'm just impatient and my partner doesn't get it, i'm so tempted to buy a straight talk card for my old cell phone so I can use it as a hotspot to connect to the Internet but have to wait a but longer lol
I'm sorry, but that's too funny. It sounds like your buddy either wanted to run a bootleg copy of the software, or make a photocopy of the book so that he could run a bootleg copy.
I know there may be another reason, but it sounds like you were hurt not by the authors of Bard's Tale, but by your friend, a software pirate.
At any rate, a number of your examples sound like, "I don't lock my doors anymore because I keep losing my keys, so locks are bad."
-- Walt Sterdan
Thanks for the advice about setting it to something.
Oddly enough, my friends had a habit of buying the same games as I did because we had similar tastes in games. If one of us lost our manual, we could borrow it from someone else and make a copy so we could continue to play the games we'd paid for.
Using your key analogy, it's like being told that because you lost your key you have to spend over $100 for a locksmith to come to your home and make you a new key instead of borrowing your roommate's key and spending $2 at Walmart to get a new copy made.
Nope. He took every game pretty seriously. And was a voracious reader. He borred the book. Read it over night; it was actually a 20 odd page story comprising the background of the game. Then went out and bought his own copy.
fine, you want an example of screwed by DRM that involves no piracy?
I have Fable III. Purchased it and its DLC. Microsoft shut down Games for Windows Live, and as of this year decided that they couldn't be bothered to keep up a server for the PC DLC for this game. There is now no legit way to get the content I paid for. This is after telling users it would remain available, and with the X-Box versions still available. So here's a I got locked out because the lock company didn't feel like maintaining a server for 'old content' and gleefully directed me to ways I can pay them even more money to get a different version of the content I paid for.
Do I think Daz would do something like that? I don't know, and it sounds like neither do they.
As a Carrara and Carrara content owner I don't have such a cavalier attitude to its lack of development and potential redundancy. As a long term owner of products by Adobe, Sony, BorisFX, FXHome, Autodesk, Red Giant, Cakewalk, Ableton, Cockos etc. the only example of a company stopping the development of one of its product line that I can recall is when Sony stopped developing ACID Pro without even announcing it.
Even with Animate, Graphmate and Keymate, animation in DAZ is like trying to thread a needle with boxing gloves on. Join up a few aniblocks from different vendors and see if the feet still touch the ground. Then spend days manually editing keyframes to make it so.
The amount of threads requesting physics and dynamic cloth and hair over the years are pretty hard to ignore. Instead the R&D time and budget were spent developing DRM and a third content filing system which very few, if any, have requested.
As a Poser owner with large amounts of DAZ content it's a shame I can't take advantage of its features with newer content I own when DS just isn't the right tool for the job.
As a Carrara and Carrara content owner I don't have such a cavalier attitude to its lack of development and potential abandonment. As a long term owner of products by Adobe, Sony, BorisFX, FXHome, Autodesk, Red Giant, Cakewalk, Ableton, Cockos etc. the only example of a company stopping the development of one of its product line that I can recall is when Sony stopped developing ACID Pro without even announcing it.
Even with Animate, Graphmate and Keymate, animation in DAZ is like trying to thread a needle with boxing gloves on. Join up a few aniblocks from different vendors and see if the feet still touch the ground. Then spend days manually editing keyframes to make it so.
The amount of threads requesting physics and dynamic cloth and hair over the years are pretty hard to ignore. Instead the R&D time and budget were spent developing DRM and a third content filing system which very few, if any, have requested.
As a Poser owner with large amounts of DAZ content it's a shame I can't take advantage of its features with newer content I own when DS just isn't the right tool for the job.
Oh, I can site plenty from Adobe... remember Adobe GoLive (CyberStudio)? Yeah, they discontinued it for a competing product they also acquired: Adobe Dreamweaver. They also discontinued ImageReady for Fireworks. Then discontinued development for Fireworks, pushing Photoshop instead. The list goes on. Also, Autodesk discontinued Softimage... that was a big deal to a lot of folks in VFX.
But I get your point. I too have Carrara and Carrara content — I was lured into it, but the snails pace of development drew me away from it, and DAZ Studio's free Iray implementation got all of my attention. I am still disappointed by the lack of Genesis 3 DSON Importer support for Poser though.
Whilst some sort of watermarking or signing of material would be preferrable to encryption, it would never work for one main reason, DS must also work with unsigned content, ie content you create yourself, download as freebies, or purchase from a different store. That means DS would have to able to recognise that the content you are trying to load is DAZ content, and look for the signature, and refuse to use the content if it failed to find the signature, or the signature was wrong. So all a pirate would need to do is alter the stolen content in some way so that DS no longer thinks it is protected DAZ content. DS could be clever, having a secret record of how to determine something was DAZ, for example looking for a certain word, in a certain file, on a certain line, but they would have to be very careful not to match accidently with some other content, that is not DAZ, and that would really annoy the user if they could not load that.
In short signatures seem a good idea, but are very difficult to work in a relatively free for all content market that we have now. I am sure DAZ considered it, and then realized that it was not workable.
Wait till they find out there's a personal ID in each file that traces back to the buyer Lol! Just kidding guys don't take it seriously
Not true, you can load the item, make the change and save it as a new version until the error is fixed.
Not true. Daz has already provided a capability to provide links to the Connect-installed files (encrypted or not) so you can move them around in your file browser. As for components, why do you need to move around the components? If you routinely like to move around files in Data or in Runtime:Textures, why?
Renderosity has done that for years. Have you never received an email from them telling you that an item you purchased has been updated and the new files are waiting for you to download?