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cridgit
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Are these errors mainly Smart Content related? I'm only using the Content Library and I encounter bad products fairly often but definitely not at that rate.
To be fair, Daz's quality control has improved significantly over the past year, maybe eighteen months. Most of the items have basic functionality of the product's primary features. I don't know that "Well, the primary features work, don't they?" is a great standard to uphold.
I don't know how large the quality control/testing staff is, but I don't think it's large enough given that Daz is releasing dozens of new products per week. Most of us are living with minor/secondary problems with items rather than asking for refunds. The ratio of product updates to new releases suggests a "good enough" attitude prevails.
Smart content categorization errors aren't exactly the most serious of errors, but there isn't any reason to believe that they would be unusually difficult to correct. That sort of thing ought to corrected with a product update within a reasonable time.
The thing that really bugs me is that some of these are so blatantly obvious, like a g8f product being in a folder labled "Genessis 8 Female" or a character being in a folder labled "character" instead of the proper "characters". I've even got a Dragon 3 product that shows up in its own folder under "people" I can understand PAs making these kinds of mistakes, but even the most rudimentary product testing should have caught stuff like that.
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<Insert joke about Daz needing to hire you here>
Bear in mind that, as far as I ama ware, metadata is created in-house as part of the QA and package process, it isn't one person creating it and another person proofing it - that makes it much easier to miss errors /looks shame-faced at own posts/.
I don't look at miscatagorization as an error, I look at it as a fun "solve the mystery" game. I buy a TON of content and I NEVER expect it to be in a logical catagory. Most often it is in the right place, but not a day goes by that I don't have to go to extraordinary lengths to find something.
This is by far the worst thing about using Studio, and I still do not understand why it keeps happening. Isn't there a standard for packaging products for installation? My current Figures folder structure has Genesis 8, Genesis 8 Female, Genesis 8 Females, Genesis 8.1 female, Genesis 8 Male, Genesis 8.1 Male, and Mr Scallywags folders, while my main content folder has a "Figures" folder with "Animal", "Metal Golem", and "Predatron" folders in it. I've got "Lights" and "Light Preset" folders, with some lights being in the Environments folder. I've got a "General" folder in the middle of everything with Linday hair, some random plaid textures, a Traveler folder with gem shaders, and a weight map tutorial for the Charming Ever After outfit inside a "DAZ3D" folder. I won't even attempt to explain what my Props folder looks like, or mention how many vendor vanity folders I've got.
There's no excuse for this. DAZ needs to follow their own Category content structure and products shouldn't go out if they can't easily be located. I don't know these days if the PAs are responsible for setting up their content directories or if that's done by someone building the installers, but ENOUGH. I'm buying less and less content because I CAN'T FREAKING FIND ANYTHING when I need it.
...this is why some like myself have taken the time to set up our own custom library/runtime structures to create a more logical organisation of items.
This was a lot worse when we still just used the old Poser runtime structure as for example, items like shaders ended un in places like the "Poses" instead of "Materials" folder. Often times product folders used the names of the creator instead of what the item was. (this latter situation still does persist).
Yeah, there is the database and smart content, but when it breaks it is a pain to deal with, and any products without metadata will not show up (particularly freebies not from here).unless you find a way to make them to. Sometimes even products from the Daz store don't show up. and end up in the "lost & Found" requiring a refresh of the database.
Maybe I'm just an old frat, but it seems to me that the writer of the error should be the first to notice the error, and therefor[inject 'e' here] duty-bound to fix it. That's how it used to be back in the olden days, and since I am an old frat, I know this to be the case.
You young folks are just lazzy.
I joke when I'm serious, btw, it keeps my blood pressure down.
Does that roughly traslate to "too many cooks spoil the broth"?
;)
I've made my own solution to get around this, it just requires that you install things with DIM and use the Content Library in DS. Select a product in the database, and you can find all parts of it in DS no matter where it is installed (also old Poser stuff) with a few clicks. See video here:
https://www.screencast.com/t/ofZEsVpkwyN
I don't have Product Manager, and while it looks like a useful tool, it still shows all of the individual files lumped together in a product. This is a problem when you need to find specific MATs that don't have unique names (like when 3Delight and Iray shaders are included but their names are the same because they're in separate subfolders). You also have to remember the name of the product. For 20 years, I manually sorted my content and ignored Smart Content, and while it was easy to find things because I had a folder structure (like any non-human living thing would go in an Animals-Creatures folder instead of, you know, Figures/Vendor Name/Creatures/Fantasy/Product Name), it became too hard and time consuming to manage. I tried Smart Content about two years ago and it's been a nightmare ever since.
Personally I don't care where DAZ decides to install a product because the first thing I do when DIM has done its job is to move stuff to where I want it. I have never used Smart Content for that reason. I'm always amused at the decisions to put environments under props and vice versa. But then there are some products that actually fail to load correctly if they are not where the creator designated (hard coded paths?). Also, I have noticed an increase in errors finding textures, etc. in newer products. I get the impression (mods - this is not "speculation presented as fact" so think before you delete) that DAZ might need to adjust the QA process.
In Soviet Russia, product categorise you.
Glad I'm not the only one. I can't prove anything stastically because the sample size is too small. Qualitative though, one trend: inaccurate information in product pages. (N=12.) "G8.1 and G8 Product-- Supported Shapes: FBM[G8-Product] The waist, foot, toes... You name it and the item will load on the actor but with poke through or (for example) the waist will be too large. No amount of tweaking with third party morphs seems to fix the waist in DS4.12 and DS 4.20; toes might require end-user knowing how to make a custom preset file. The list goes on...
Disturbing that DAZ and or PA isn't correcting information on the product pages. Still reads, "Supports FBM[G8 Product]" when it does not! : 0 !
Also disturbing is lack of enduser support files-- particularly shoes. Example: load a shoe and it will deform toes. Delete shoes and mesh for toes smushed. No "Reset" tile provided. End-users are expected have a 'properties' file in Presets to fix.
Also disturbing is seeming lack of material zones on items. Sometimes I can use geo-tool; other times not. Disturbing that vehicles are a collection of objects where end-user is expected to rig things like flight control surfaces on an air plane. I can do it, but at $24.95 shouldn't the vendor's job?
Charging more money for (subjectively) less quality.
Not a very sound business model for sustained growth in my estimate. Depressing or just a turn off. Won't be buying from some vendors anymore. : /
More like many hands make light work
It's not hard to make a simple checklist of things to check before the item goes live. I write them all the time...
Does the product install?
Are the files in the right place?
Are there any misspellings?
Does the product load as expected?
Then do three or four random renders with them to look for any abnormalities.
It takes 10 minutes, tops. It won't catch every error, but if it prevents 10 minutes of Customer Support effort... Isn't that alone worth it?
It really doesn't matter who is making the mistakes. What matters is that there are plenty of people who can make a checking program to catch all this kind of basic stuff at the file level before it goes onto the store. In fact, more than a few people like that sell products here. If DAZ isn't using something like that to check the metadata that they, themselves, create, then exactly what in the heck does "DAZ quality assurance" actually mean?
Perhaps the catalog items are being treated like art works instead of products. An artwork is finished when presented for sale, where beauty is subjective and is in the eye of the beholder, and the creator walks away with the money. Complaints are ignored, implying "Go away boy, ya bother me!”
A modeling product, on the other hand, is a machine that needs accurate documentation, and proper functionality and "beauty" is objective and measurable. Otherwise the buyer is going to complain and the creator might lose his money. Implying that the creator's response should be "Yes sir! You're right sir! Right away sir! Please don't take my money away, sir."
Other stores can manage to do QA just fine, so IMO, DAZ QA is just not doing their job.
This should be the job of an automated testing system for quality control — preferably using machine learning based on artificial neural networks — that has been trained on files and folder structures that follow best practices for every product type. It should learn from every file it processes and be able to correct issues before a product is released, or even after it is released (to make corrections to older products, and provide compatibility updates for the latest version of Daz Studio).
When new kinds of issues are identified by customers that it didn't catch, additional training could be added to its model to help it identify and correct these new types of issues for all products from that point forward.
With such a large volume of old and new products in the entire Daz 3D catalog, there is a massive amount of data — Big Data — full of complex data sets and data sources that an A.I. system could be able to sift through and recognize patterns, perfect for deep learning and natural language processing to be used, and train the system to identify common file format patterns, proper file paths, proper file naming conventions, understand various data models and syntax, and even be able to make predictive changes and make generative output. It could make automatic corrections to typographical errors, make corrections to miscategorization of items, automatically generate all required metadata on the fly, produce more accurate product descriptions and file lists of what's included and features.
An artificial intelligence that could sense, reason, act, and adapt using machine learning algorithms whose performance improves as it is exposed to more data over time, and use deep learning with a multilayered neural network to learn from vast amounts of data — a system like this would be so much faster and far more thorough than any human or group of humans; it would be instrumental in providing quality products and maintaining a library of content as massive as the Daz 3D catalog.
Sounds like a great idea but would it work on FBMs? A person testing wardrobe items all day would likely find it tedius and boring. Fatigue = human mistakes. AI would never tire and might even be more accurate.
In the last two months, about 52% of wardrobe products for G8.1F and G8F have had an error fitting to the shape of the actor waist. The wardrobe figure's waist is too large for g8. The adjustment morphs move the clothing items' waist out but not in. ???
Could AI be used to verify if a part of a rigged figure-- the waist in this question-- matches the waist of the target figure, the actor? If so, that would make life easier for everyone! I could buy with confidence again; CS wouldn't have to bother with my store credit requests.
52% on the bell curve isn't significant until research considers the skew. With quality control, I'd think 1-2% of products might have unexpected errors. That's just me though. Since I've retired, my research & math skills are pretty rusty. ; )
...
...that's what I do as well.
Adding too Richards comment. The PA's aren't allowed to do their own metadata. It is strictly done in-house by the testers as part of the testing processing for consistency reasons. There would be way too many variations in metadata if PA's did their own.
heh, I'm just shaking my head looking at that rather long list. I don't know how they test & screen their products, but it might be a good idea to either hold off on releasing new content or hire some of the PAs to work in QA. This just tells me that someone is not doing a very good job of checking this stuff before it reaches the end user. And I'm also noticing the forums still have sporadic connection problems. Before making this post, I must have spent several minutes trying to open a message that was sent to me and had to retry 4 times due to some issue with Daz's forum host. While I can't say things are getting worse, it does appear to me that some things aren't getting much better...
Then who builds the installers with these ridiculous structures like I've mentioned? The PAs aren't the ones seeing to it that their products get installed in folders named after themselves?
I've been struggling with all or most of the issues discussed here. I have a rather fragile "artistic spirit." I deal with anxiety and panic attacks at the same time I feel like making some art. My energy is quickly diminished when I can't find an item or encounter an error in an item I just bought. A classic example is an error I reported over two years ago. It took two years to fix that error!