How About Standardizing File Names for Characters?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
You buy hundreds of characters for a dozen figures or more. Instead of content creators just naming the file after the character, they arbitarily just slap on any random file name. When you go to use the product, you look for the name of the character, and more often than not, you don't find it. Because it's in a folder with some other name. And that name can begin with an exclaimation mark or a couple of them, or some mysterious anagram that is suppose to represent the artist's name, or a bunch of letters that mean nothing to anyone except the person who created the file. It is very very frustrating looking for character files. Can't the file names be standardized somehow? Like - character name + artist's identity + figures the character is created for? With either the character's name first, or the figure name first? It is unlikely anyone looks for characters by artist's name, so that can come last. Optimize the findability of character files. I have characters that show up as !SV7, ADSI, and Elven-Artist. Those file names are really of no help at all. Nobody wants to have to open a whole lot of files, just to find one.
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Comments
If you use DIM you can easily see all the names of the files used for a particular product no matter how strangely the files are actually named.
What about all the other software programs the contnet is used in, like Poser, Blender, Vue, etc. How are you suppose to find content in those programs?
What about all the other software programs the contnet is used in, like Poser, Blender, Vue, etc. How are you suppose to find content in those programs?
The file and folder names on disk are the same no matter what program you're using the content in, aren't they? Isn't that what you were asking about in the original post, the file and folder names?
I would think DAZ content is limited to DS and poser for the most part. Never seen a content folder for blender.
The naming is more a poser thing than a DS thing from my experience. I have a huge poser runtime setup for my poser files and I use those in DS along with my DS file structure folders and find the DS ones to be much cleaner and the content easier to find than the poser runtime file structure ones. Then again, I don't use DSON of genesis content in poser
I've got two content folders for Blender...working and finished.
And yep, all those weird !!!!!!! names are a Poser thing. Along with poses that change textures and colors...and hair that is a prop and hats that are figures...
Content from the DAZ store should not use !s and the like in folder names. They may be allowed inside the folder, to allow the base shape and materials to be listed before the additions such as make-ups and tattoos, though more often that si handled by numbering the files.
When I am Benevolent Dictator of the World, my Stormtroopers of Loving Kindness and Sympathy will be paying a visit to certain content creators. After thanking them for all their hard work, the Stormtroopers will present them with a short list of "suggestions" that they might like to consider when implementing their products.
After a few months, the Stormtroopers will return. If, at that time, they discover that any particular content creator is still installing their components in arbitrary directories scattered all up and down the document tree, or giving components arbitrary names full of underscores and exclamation marks, or otherwise complicating the task of finding or using stuff, the Stormtroopers will -- lovingly, kindly, sympathetically -- drag them off to the Leech-Filled Swamp Pits of Ultimate Suffering, where they can reflect on their misdeeds and consider how they might do better next time.
Benevolent I will certainly be, but there are few things that yank my crank more than content popping up here, there and everywhere in the filesystem, turning the simple task of applying a pose or choosing a material into a five-hour odyssey through a maze of arbitrarily-named folders. So be warned ...
The underscore instead of a space is do to some older OSes and software not liking spaces in file names. In fact a lot of what people don't like is due to technical issues at the time the product was and vendors getting stuck in to bad habits.
Actually programming-wise, spaces IS a bad habit for names. Besides, a space isn't found by using a name with a space; that character is converted to % 20. Trying typing a web page name with a space, you'll be typing the % 20 for any spaces in the name. Even files saved from DS uses the % 20 for spaces in the .duf files. Underscores or the capitalization is a better way of handing filename as you know exactly what the name is without conversion. Though you can use spaces in some names, actual names that are parsed should not have spaces, such as names of morphs.
Edit: I had to retype that code as the html eats it in my post, hence the reason for using underscores for the name.
LOL
I will sleep soundly tonight knowing that that will never happen. mind you I keep things simple
Actually programming-wise, spaces IS a bad habit for names.
Mmm, underscores in filenames don't actually bother me that much, and they're there for a reason (although I'm more an InterCaps man myself).
It's more the file organization (or lack thereof) that causes issues. Despite periodic attempts at reorganization, and use of the DAZ Install Manager (plus my own homemade tools for managing non-DAZ content), my content directories remain a festering mess. In an ideal world, conventions for organizing and naming content would have been tightly defined from the beginning, and might have included a manifest file that specified presentation and layout. Those pesky exclamation marks are simply a hack to try to force the most important parts to appear first in a listing (usually within a single package, although a few content creators have been known to use this to try to ensure that their content appears before everyone else's). A manifest-based approach might have eliminated the need for this kind of hack.
Ah well, too late now. We just have to accept it as 'just how things are'.
At least until I become Benevolent Dictator of the World.
Mmm, underscores in filenames don't actually bother me that much, and they're there for a reason (although I'm more an InterCaps man myself).
It's more the file organization (or lack thereof) that causes issues. Despite periodic attempts at reorganization, and use of the DAZ Install Manager (plus my own homemade tools for managing non-DAZ content), my content directories remain a festering mess. In an ideal world, conventions for organizing and naming content would have been tightly defined from the beginning, and might have included a manifest file that specified presentation and layout. Those pesky exclamation marks are simply a hack to try to force the most important parts to appear first in a listing (usually within a single package, although a few content creators have been known to use this to try to ensure that their content appears before everyone else's). A manifest-based approach might have eliminated the need for this kind of hack.
Ah well, too late now. We just have to accept it as 'just how things are'.
At least until I become Benevolent Dictator of the World.
Most content I've seen that has exclamation points are from content I get from other storefronts. I think how what is offered technology-wise changes how stuff is organized, particularly when the genesis was split into two. There is a bit of standardization that is in place, however it wouldn't be retroactive and preferences differ between people.
The lowly Underscore (the IBM EBCDIC "Break Character") is still king today, and not because it was a genius idea. Underscores can also prevent the confusing "breaking up" of a file name in certain software directory lists. Sharepoint comes to mind, for those of us using that in our day jobs.
my_filename_with_underscore_separators.jpg
...would be represented just like that, with the display column being made wide enough to display the files.
But spaces or hyphens might end up being translated to a virtually unreadable column width:
my
filename
with
space
separators.jpg
Yuck. But this I think is indicative of a bigger problem; one of philosophical approach. While we have come so far since the 1960s, in some respects we're still living (and working) in 1972.
[minirant]
Much work is still left to do in the area of user interfaces and display formatting. Programmers used to have to fill out forms and go through review processes to ensure application ease-of-use and operability. But no more, not for decades has this been done. And that's probably the reason I and people like me complain so damned much about the Carrara UI (and others, Carrara is not the only sinner in this church, mind you!), and in my opinion, it's one major reason keeping Carrara from really kicking butt in the marketplace. Blender, with its infinite configurability has it all going aces, although a lot of stuff is all over the place, making it a lot to get your head around.
[/minirant]
[microrant]
The DAZ Studio content interface suffers in a similar way, not having to do with the underscore/lack thereof, but instead having no consistent AND ENFORCED factory naming and content-type standards for folders and directory structure width and depth.
[/microrant]
Time spent on naming conventions and user interfaces used to be one of the most important aspects of any project in DP (oops, I meant "IT"). What happened?