Question about items going to the Vault
outrider42
Posts: 3,679
The section where items marked for the vault clearly states: "Vaulted Items are only accessible to those who already have them in their product library and may not be available for purchase in the future."
But I noticed that several of these vault items are a part of bundles, some not so long ago, FWSA Frida is a part of the Karen 7 Pro Bundle. So what does this mean when Frida goes into the vault? Will the product still be a available as part of this bundle or is the product going to be removed from the bundle, too? That would be pretty terrible, IMO, as that would devalue the Pro bundle unless it gets a price change to compensate. There are other products marked for the vault that are part of Starter and Pro bundles, so I want to know what the situation is here.
Secondly, I am not a fan of the vault in any form. Removing content, no matter how old, is just not cool in my book. I get the idea is to declutter the store. Fine. But this can be resolved by creating a secondary store within Daz. A store that functions somewhat like GOG (Good Old Games) was founded on. The promise of GOG is to keep old games alive and legally available for modern operating systems. It is a niche market...but it is a market. Daz could do the same thing here. You can have a sub section of the store that works as if it is a different store, and the old items that would be vaulted do not come up in normal searches when using the main store (unless the customer specifically selects a search setting). This would both declutter the main Daz store and also keep the old products alive and legally available to purchase for people interested in them. As it stands, you still have to keep vault items on your servers so that customers who did purchase them can download them. So why not make use of that server space bu spinning it into a separate store? The secondary store would be, well, secondary, so it would be as updated as the main store.
I cannot be the only one who thinks that vaulting Genesis 3 products is a bit crazy? Frida was released in August of 2015. That might be old by industry standards, but given that modern Genesis 8 and 8.1 can use Genesis 3 skin textures right out of the box, this product is not truly outdated. There are also pose packs, which are trivial to convert thanks to multiple and even free pose converters, as well as other props and items that can all be easily plugged into any modern Genesis 8 scene without much effort.
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Comments
outrider42
Also I think that permanently remove a product isn't a good move.
The major problem is the changed render engine... G3 was for 3DeLight as default but now, all products are Iray compatible. So if you buy a new dress/environment and you want to use it with old products, you must convert materials and many times results are not soo good as expected.
Also DAZ and many other stores don't want to support 3DeLight any more, so if you suggest a product for this engine, they reject it.
I've actually bought bundles that, looking at the ad copy speccified in the ad-copy that they included one or more items that had been discontinued as individual products, some while after the individual products had gone from the store, and the discontinued item(s) still arrived as part of the bundle.
I've now seen several items from these "vault sales" in the store long after the sale was over. The "may" in that sentence is doing some heavy lifting.
I'm starting to wonder if any of those items truly get vaulted. Can someone point to any article that was removed from the store after they were in a vault sale? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not trying to be confrontational or something. Items for $1 and $2, that's a good deal, thank you! More of that, please.
But "vaulting", no matter how you feel about it... I suspect it may just be marketing embellishing things a little. It may not actually be happening. May!
I think Hylas is right! I've observed the same thing. Granted, Vault Sale is a great way to grab the items at a nice discount, but I am not convinced all the items actually end up in The Vault. And that's not a complaint.
...yeah it's not like it's taking up space in a warehouse or car lot. Also many of those older products (particularly the installers) are relatively small in memory size compared to today.
As to the highlighted statement, I am among that group as I pretty much stopped at G3. Bad enough nobody is making new content for it but to pare down what is available is disappointing to say he least. A lot of G8 clothing doesn't often transfer well without needing some form of conversion tool or meticulous manual refitting. Then there's the matter of hierarchal presets that have biome more prevalent with G8/8.1 which are also a bother to deal with when retrofitting to G3.
To fully retool for G8 (which is now being superseded by 8.1) and make it as useful as G3 is for my purposes is out of my budget.
..another reason as well as I do use 3DL as well as Carrara.
kyoto kid said:
...yeah it's not like it's taking up space in a warehouse or car lot. Also many of those older products (particularly the installers) are relatively small in memory size compared to today.
As to the highlighted statement, I am among that group as I pretty much stopped at G3. Bad enough nobody is making new content for it but to pare down what is available is disappointing to say he least. A lot of G8 clothing doesn't often transfer well without needing some form of conversion tool or meticulous manual refitting. Then there's the matter of hierarchal presets that have biome more prevalent with G8/8.1 which are also a bother to deal with when retrofitting to G3.
To fully retool for G8 (which is now being superseded by 8.1) and make it as useful as G3 is for my purposes is out of my budget.
..another reason as well as I do use 3DL as well as Carrara.
I am going to have to push back at this a little. When I worked in a laboratory, for over twenty-five years,I maintained the digital history of the lab. I had a constellation of computers, drives, software, and disks, floppy and not, zip and not etc. It is a pain with very little reward. It is true that digital assets don't take up shelf space but they make up for that by requiring a lot of work and ancillaries. For example, a garment for Victoria 1 requires reqular inventory to make sure the files still exists, still works, hopefully doesn't require any support, needs a version of Poser and Daz studio that support it, requires a computer that supports those software versions, requires backups of the computers and the storage, and still is taxed like any other inventory even if you sell just two copies every five years. That is a whole lot of infrastructure and work for a niche product. My sister worked as an executive for two major museums; she introduced me to the term, deaccessioning, which every musuem or library employee is aware of. If you cling to the past, you must give up the future.
yeah well genesis 3 and 8 is the sole reason I even use DAZ studio at all, I mostly use Carrara and Aiko3, M3, V3, V4, M4 and I use them in DAZ studio too.
when I use DAZ programs that is
otherwise D|S is just an exporter of DAZ content for me
and the newer stuff is getting increasingly incompatible with export
the only stuff I buy these days is the vault and legacy sales
Yeah the whole vault thing still seems like the Daz sales team shooting themselves in the foot. Some people still want to buy some of this stuff for various reasons.
They could put a disclaimer saying that 'hasn't been tested in Daz Studio 4r20' or 'no support available for this product' if they were worried about such things.
I don't get why some people say it's a pain to convert 3Delight stuff to Iray. I use the Iray Uber Base shader for this all the time with older products, and it's pretty easy peasy. Sure, it's an extra step, but it's easy to do. And sure, the textures may not be 'optimized' for Iray, but that doesn't mean they won't work. And often I just use cloth shaders or whatever on stuff if I want to try to update the look. Some stuff will look primitive regardless, but for some rendering formats (say if you are going for a retro or cartoon look) said 'primitive items' can 'fit in' just fine.
And, as noted, some people are able to use these characters/items elsewhere, say in Poser or Carrera or whatever, so it's not like there isn't an audience out there for it. Not a huge audience, but an audience nonetheless.
And there is a lot of cool older stuff that I use here and there, depends on where the artistic muse takes me.
As noted, it's not like storage space is expensive. It's extremely cheap these days, and since they are keeping 'backup copies' anyways for customers that already bought said products, well that space is in use either way.
If a PA quits the store or pulls the product on their end, that's a slightly different situation, but otherwise, I say keep it around and available for purchase forever. Someone might want said ancient thing eventually... I've been there a few times now where some old DS thing that I found via a Google search isn't available any longer/links to the readme page, which makes me sad.
If it's simply a matter of applying Iray Uber base then you are doing, before any customisation, what DS does at render time. The tricky bits, aside from some special cases, are custom shaders where applying Iray Uber Base will give just a blank surface.
Ironic, ain't it, given that it wasn't that long ago that DAZ's promotions were all about the "use our content in other programs!"? Then again, it wasn't long ago that they were all about "Use our contents in games!" even as the average file size of a DS product was sliding from bloated to ginormous, and let's not even go into their ongoing efforts to sell DS as an animation program...
Anyway, to chime in on the actual subject, yes, a lot of the "to be vaulted" items DO hang around despite the promotional blurbs... which, again, is ironic given how often newer products and even entire vendors' stores will disappear without a trace or word from DAZ as to why, how, or what happened, while the actual product pages in the documentation center get erased from history like the missing Soviet Cosmonauts airbrushed out of the old photos.
Readmes usually stay even after a product is removed, at least in the cases I have come across.
The thing is that Daz still provides the products to people who own them. So they still have to keep the files up on a server somewhere. Thus removing an item from the store does not allow them to just delete the item from their server. They are not clearing data space.
All they can really do is maybe move the items to a smaller or less used server that doesn't require as much maintainence. But doesn't Daz use a 3rd party company for their servers anyway? It isn't something that Daz needs to be all that worried about, that's the server company's job.
The primary argument I recall seeing for removal is some PAs wish items to be removed to keep their stores less cluttered. That does make sense, there are 25,000+ items in the store, and most of them are in fact quite old. But I addressed this in my post, as Daz could place these items in a separate section of the store. This still declutters the store, and allows the items to be purchased in a legal manner by those who might want them. Obviously they will not sell like hot cakes, but I would believe that the collective sales of a Classic Daz product section would at least help pay the server bills to keep them going. If the products are removed from the store, they make exactly zero money to pay server costs...which again Daz needs to pay regardless.
...well said.
Converting from 3DL to Iray is pretty much a snap. I've even used some 3DL content without converting to Iray Uber an it looked fine. About the most I had to do is make sure to change the lighting model from plastic (which seemed to be the default) to matte as that affected the glossy channels in Iray. Also some older content, particularly for Poser, needs to have Reflection maps removed and the Ambient channel zeroed (that was even the case to use it in 3DL).
However as mentioned ain the thread going to other way from Iray to 3DL is more problematic and to get things to look good as not all he Iray channels translate well (particularly lighting that is built into a set or prop) and can take some time to make the proper manual adjustments.
No, you're not the only one who thinks vaulting Genesis 3 product makes little sense. Esecially when, at the same time, DAZ continues to sell products that are add ons or companion items for other products that haven't been in the store for years. Now, when there are products that no longer work as advertised, there is a valid argument for vaulting the product and there have been some questionable calls on that, such as allowing a vendor to release a new product under the same name as an older one that they stopped supporting, yet not requiring the vendor to at least offer an upgrade path to those stuck with the non-working versions. However, to expect logic out of anything that DAZ does is a futile exercise.
You have not used the content without converting as Daz Studio does it at render time - for supported shaders.
Yeah, leave my G3 and every day little essentials alone. And spend more time flagging, documenting, and fixing old installion routines and vanity names in the top level categories!
Vaguely related: I still get products doing the vanishing act from time to time on "x" computer, while they are available and work fine on sundry computers y and z. I suspect it happens more with "old" stuff like The Billiard Table or The Egg but anyway.
Also that Humpty Egg thing -- https://www.daz3d.com/humpty-for-genesis-8-male -- is (like the Emotiguy, pip the chick, storybook mouse and pufflet the bunny) the funniest thing I've seen in a long time! Bring on a female version and some clothes and accessories! Also while Catoon would make for a suitable "Chesire Cat", how about a Queen of Tarts? Sorry I haven't looked all of the "Alice" related items but I'm too giggly a.t.m... a "flat", anamorphic figure with a head and arms and legs is what I'm thinking - and optional slightly roundedr corners.
That fox thing for G8M (or Dog 8) is another killer. Liss Mikita!!!