Elora for G8F by Kooki99 triggers duplicate formula
Rod Wise Driggo
Posts: 2,229
in The Commons
Bought this figure as PFAD some weeks ago and had it probably installed recently with some other products. Triggered duplicate formula errors unfortunately which stopped after uninstalling. Did anybody experience the same?
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Comments
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It is unlikely that Elora alone has a duplicate formula error (not impossible, but unlikely). Most likely it's two characters using some of the same names for their selective sliders. You need to identify the other properties involved in the issue (probably another Elora, but check the log file - Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File to find the actual Duplicate Formulas error and see the problem name) and report them to the author/to Daz.
Do you perchance have the character Elora from Renderosity? Names sometimes conflict. It's one reason a lot of PAs add initials in front of morphs along with trying to find unique spellings for names...
I believe I uninstalled that product for the very same reason.
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I’ve had a duplicate formula error for years. I have no idea what’s causing it or how to remove it. I just wait for for about 25 minutes EVERY time I load G8...
Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File, search fro Duplicate - the line(s) you find will give one of the morphs involved
I don't have another Elora. And due to load times I am quite restrictive with the figures I have installed. There are a lot of errors reported in the log file and none of them referes to a different product but rather G8F like
// Duplicate formula found linking xOrigin & Elora Body in /data/DAZ 3D/
Don't have the time to play around and install Elora on a plain G8F. But I would really appreciate either development or QA to make sure that products bought here won't interfere with any others. Might be something to ask but that would be a good direction to develop studio further. As it is it actually disencourages one from buying more stuff.
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Since both Eloras are in Daz products I would definitely think it worth reporting.
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I am not trying to say it's fine if things get sold broken. But how would you check for duplicate errors without having all the morphs installed for that figure from the store? Wouldn't that take QA over an hour to load just one G8F? A simple name check should definitely be done, but as for the errors made with characters and products with different names, I'm not sure how you'd catch it.
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Surely you jest.
I guess a searchable database would be nice. But I can't imagine Daz actually going through and making one. Doesn't seem "cost-effective."
Perhaps the way DS reads the data could be changed to at least aid in minimizing this issue. I think it is enevitable that products use the same name get released at some point. It is impossible for us all to keep track of that. What DS needs to do is to have a better way of treating this problem instead of popping up errors and jacking up load times by absurd margains. If Daz wishes to be a popular product, it is their best interest to find a way to handle this, because this issue only happens because of popularity. All sorts of places are making Daz content, and Daz releases a ton of content every day. Either way, the users get extremely frustrated with these kinds of issues.
As for what DS can actually do, I think a new setting in the menu to tell DS "hey, I do not want to load these character morphs" would be our answer to a lot of problems. I think A LOT of people would want this option. Since most people do not want to go back to the Victoria 4 way of injecting morphs, I think this kind of setting would be the best of both. This setting is found in the preferences menu, and users would be able to define which morphs to ignore. It is not the same as uninstalling or moving a character's files, which is pretty annoying. Users could in and search by name for what morphs to ignore, and check them off. This option needs to exist so people can load their characters faster and also avoid this duplicate ID issue. When they wish to use those morphs again, they simply remove them from the ignore list.
I am sure a number of clever script writers would also come up with ways to enhance this experience for users, which would offer Daz the chance to sell something on top of solving this problem. A chance to solve a problem AND make money on top of it? Sounds like a WIN-WIN.
The longer Daz ignores this issue the more of a problem it will become. And frustrating users is what turns them away. That loses money.
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There is the world of ideals, and the world of practical application. Ideally, Daz wouldn't be in this situation. They would have foreseen the problem and/or be doing something to fix it this very moment. But as a business, Daz has to think about the bottom line. It would take so much time to test these things ahead of time with a fully loaded G8, or to build a database, that it would cost a crap ton of money. It's far, far, far cheaper to fix things as they come and maybe get a little proactive about naming. And they do need to think about that overhead. Also, they can't account for all the products from all the other stores and websites, so the problem would still exist with, say, similar characters from Rendo. A different idea might be more practical.
I think adding a feature to tell Daz not to load certain morphs is a great idea. It won't let you use everything without a duplicate error, but duplicate errors don't actually stop you from using a figure. They are just annoying and time-consuming. This would let you avoid that time consumption and annoyance unless you really wanted to use two conflicting morphs. It would also help with the seriously big problem of major buyers having massive load times. I honestly don't know how they deal with waiting 40 minutes to load a G8F. It would drive me nuts!
Daz could bill it as a major improvement and justify the cost that way, instead of saying they were just fixing a mistake that could be handled in a cheaper manner. The onus would be on the user to uncheck the errors, so Daz doesn't have to maintain a database or spend over an hour just to check out a single product. It's a one-and-done solution instead of an ongoing battle for them. Or someone could write a script, and then Daz wouldn't even have to shell out the manpower.
Would it be ideal for users to have to uncheck a hundred morphs to get a quicker load time, or to have to pay for a script? No, of course not. But it is a lot more feasible.
A dedicated PC with a hard drive containing all Daz G8 characters and morphs will not "cost a crap ton of money." Load the character, check the log. If there are no errors, you're done. If there are, you know exactly what to fix. Daz does not have to be concerned about other stores' characters, but they have regularly had duplicate formula errors and morph mixtures upon release for Daz Originals characters that have always been Daz Originals characters.
I have zero hope of it changing, but there are no excuses, only justifications for failures.
I was actually talking about the load times, which would impact the time spent testing every character and morph package. Making a database would also take a great deal of time. Labor costs money.
I don't get it. The tester won't be twiddling his/her thumbs while the character loads; they'll be doing another task until it loads, like the rest of us do. Once it loads, they'll test it. No time or labour lost.
The Victoria / Michael 4 setup used the morph checklist idea. People hated it. What we have now is the solution for that. If Genesis 8 only had a 2-year run, then we (most of us) would not have discovered the long load times of having too many morphs.
Ok, yes, that's true. I just don't see it happening. There are new characters released every day, so each day the load times would be getting incrementally longer. At the very least, the total length of time to get those characters tested would be much longer. When before you could get things through the QA process in a few minutes, each item would now take maybe an hour or longer. If you only have one computer for this process, this would mean multiple hours added to the QA workflow. You can do things while you wait, but it's still going to be a lot longer before you can get all the products through the process each day. I just can't imagine Daz slowing down their process to that degree. I guess if you had more people doing QA, and more computers set up for it, it wouldn't be so bad.
Not to forget, that DAZ store is not the only source of assets/products.
Even if DAZ had a computer with all of the (currently available) 38166 items installed, the conflicts would still be there due to all the freebies and other assets from 3rd party sources.
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Tackling the issues after they happen is not very fantastic for the customers who have to deal with them. In the long run this comes back to hurt Daz more than it is worth, as these frustrations can be what pushes the customer away. I don't know about you, but unhappy customers are usually not good for business.
We also have the secondary issue of how installing lots of morphs causes load times to increase. I think this issue is even more serious, because it can effect everybody. And it effects the most loyal customers most, which kind of feels insulting when you think about it. That Genesis 8 has had a long run is not even a point. Victoria 4 STILL has new products being created for it, years after Daz stopped selling new content. You can still find new content for Genesis 3 as well. The damage is done and is on going. We can see the posts here in the forums, as numerous people have openly said they cut back on buying new characters because of the growing load times. No matter how you try to paint it, this issue effects Daz's bottom line, and even worse, it effects their most loyal customers. That is the worst part of all this, it is the loyal customer who is more likely to get burned. Besides, cycling a new Genesis every 2 years was not going to be sustanable, either. That is very likely why 8 has lasted so long. Many customers were growing tired of new generations and this is a direct result of Daz listening to that feedback. It also takes a lot of money to develop a new figure base, so developing a new base just for the sake of doing so isn't so great. So Daz put themselves in a bind either way.
The only other thing possible is for DS to check vendor names in duplicate ID situations, and use the vendor to seperate the morphs by automatically adding a vendor sig to the morph. This vendor sig would be hidden to the customer unless they select an option to unhide them. But this would probably be time consuming as well, and it may not even be possible with DS code. But the vendor is listed in every data file. The vendor name is listed at the top of the data file, so at least scanning this information might not take too long if needed. For the cherry on top this process is permenant, so that next time the customer loads the characters they do not get duplicate IDs at all. Why DS does not already check the vendor name is beyond me.
However this solution does not address the growing load times.
I saw the PC with all the characters as the FINAL stop in QA. All other testing would be done, and the resultant file would lastly be given to the person loading the behemoth in order to check for file/naming conflicts. Of course, I, too, see this as likely as Abraham Lincoln winning the Republican nomination. Again.
Jason Galterio said:
IF the errors, when reported to tech support, were disregarded, then there would be an argument for not catching the errors before release.
However, when the errors are reported, DAZ does eventually fix them. Which means that they weren't meant to happen to begin with.
Sometimes, too often actually, Daz DOES NOT eventually fix the errors.
Thanks for the info. I did purchase Elora as PFAD and the Whimsical Teens just recently with April Showers. So installing the later after Elora produced the errors. Good to know. But as this error is caused by two products sold here which don't play nice together (and we had many more errors like that in the past), I really suggest that DAZ starts to setup a QA machine with all available DAZ content installed. And it would also show all the bad/missing metadata and the wrong directory paths if QA would take a look in explorer/finder every now and then.
Can't be that hard. Guess I own more than 1/3 of the stores products (homepage has 22.084 of 38.176 products available for me) and don't want to continue playing guinea pig.
As a game modder avoiding code conflicts is a must, if you don't it tends to bite you on the ass, same goes for software developers and game developers.
Sadly nobody told the vendors that they have to think like coders, as a result their simple morph naming systems are starting to bite everybody on the ass.
It doesn't matter what the files are called, it's the internal asset ID that's important, using FBM<character name> for the ID doesn't cut it, too many other vendors can use the same name, using something like FBM_<vendor name>_<character name> should stop that from happening.
While renaming can be done to the assets after they have been saved, it's a lot less work to do it in DS before you get anywhere near "ERC Freeze".
Unfortunely it is a bit late for the easy fix. Similar to what Bejaymac said DAZ should assign a 3 character alphanumeric code to vendors and their files should contain that code.