Bugged 4.10 want 4.9

lordofchaos_1

Is there anywhere I can get the 4.9 Daz Studio installer?  I have problems with 4.10 and Daz has been no help, 

here is my tech forumm post for further info ( https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/248616/slow-in-menus-but-iray-renders-fast#latest )

Richard Haseltine

Daz is the only source for Daz Studio, and they do not supply older versions.

Silver Dolphin

Here is a future tip. Keep the old installers for your Daz programs that way if you need to you can reinstall. I do this all the time.

stephenschoon

You've got no chance, I have a strange problem with the viewport not displaying certain vendors products correctly and they would not help at all. Later one of the vendors told me it's a Daz Studio problem with custom shaders but tech support don't want to know.

As mentioned above, in future I'll be saving the old installer whenever a Daz Studio upgrade is flagged in DIM, if only for diagnostic purposes.

S.

mindsong

FWIW, it is certainly good to save the old base-program DS installers (the EXEs and/or the DIM installer zipfiles), but realize that you will probably want the various DAZ-supported plugins as well, to install *with* the base program, and THEY ARE ALSO VERSION SPECIFIC to each release! The last version number must match (e.g. with DS 4.9.13.59, the specific plugins must end in 'X.Y.Z.59' as well, or the DAZ-sponsored plugins will not work together with a different versioned DS base!

This means: If you wish to save/re-install/run a 'complete' version of your DAZ-Studio installation version, you must save:

• the base program (64bit, and 32bit if you want the lipsync function) - DIM zips and/or EXEs from your product library
• the EXEs or zipfiles (64 and/or 32 bit) of the specific plugins that DAZ 'sponsors'. I know of these:
  • Photoshop bridge
  • Go-Z
  • Dynamic Clothng Control
  • Decimator
  • Mimic Live
  • Alembic Exporter
• optional, but recommended: the 'default content' installer(s) for the active version (they sometimes change with the version, e.g. when IRAY was added, etc.)
• optional but recommended: the various starter-essentials (Genesis1, G2m/f, G3m/f, G8m/f, D-Force, etc., and possibly closely-bound DAZ add-ons like genitalia from pro-versions) for the active version
• optional but recommended: the starter content bundles (often, the various clothes and hair will be updated to support the current Genesis base figures, so an old hair that worked with Genesis1 in DS 4.6 won't be available with the current starter content bundles). If you didn't save the older ones, you can't download the versions with the older figure content anymore.

The 'big-idea' is to save all of the core program elements (non-PA/content elements) of a DS version that you successfully depend upon while it is the current version and save them in a 'safe' separate folder (DVD/external/thumb-drive, etc.) where DIM can't overwrite them when updating things. Do this for Public-releases and betas that you like as well. It's probably a couple of Gigabytes each, but ... you can depend on DAZ or depend on yourself... your call. You can always toss them to save space later, but you cannot easily get the older versions from DAZ once they have been updated.

Also, many of the other plugins we all use that were developed using the DS-4.5 API (e.g. Keymate, Graphmate, Garibalid, Luxus, GenX2, PoserFormatExporter, and many others, seem to work with all of the DS versions since 4.5. You can back these up as well for each DS release, but having a single set for all of the 4.5+ DS releases seems to be be OK so far (If the plugin zipfiles haven't changed since the last DS release... they seem to be OK, if they work at all...)

There are cases where DS updates involve changes that break some of these plugins, but that's a different issue, and the old base DS installer (e.g. DS4.7) and the 4.5+ version of the plugin (e.g. Keymate) that worked before, will work again if installed correctly. This occurs with scripts and shaders sometimes as well, but those are seldom updated to match DS updates. AoA had some graphic shaders that broke when DS updated their 3DL engine once. Not sure who, if anyone should be responsible for fixing such a problem, but the better vendors seem to help out when they can, and sometimes they simply can't fix something that based on a library change that they depended upon acting a certain way (although AoA is one of my favorites, he never did come through on that one).

Note: With my experience with DAZ support, if you are in a problem situation, and really need a specific DS version/plugin for a project - e.g. re-rendering an old scene for a client, etc., I would bet that they would consider your circumstance and help you out if you made the request. They just don't seem to have a general interest in supporting older versions at all. It is an expense to them, so hedge your system and save/save/save...

hope this helps, and may save folks frustration, esp. when their old installers don't work with updated plugins. I would guess a binary version hack would make the newer plugins work with an older version base DS, as they don't seem to change much (e.g. Decimator hasn't changed in years), but that kinda hack is way outta my paygrade.

cheers,

--ms

Silver Dolphin

It's sad Daz does not let us downgrade. I don't know the business reason but serious bugs should not be forced on us to beta test. We are customers not beta testers. Now if Daz wants to pay us in store credit to check their software out before it is released and submit bug reports this would be great. It would take the pressure off new customers who are just breaking into this new hobby and not discourge them.