The Horrors of Content Management (A discussion/rant)

stwbcsuv_12364ebef4

I've been wanting to write a diatribe on this for a while, and seeing as I've just (partially) finished a content reorganisation on one of my hard-drives I decided now was a good time.

First a bit of back story:

I started using poser some time around 2005 maybe slightly before I've kind of lost track of time. Back in those days daz studio was just being born and content management was just a twinkle in eyes of its programmers. As a free alternative to poser to demo products found on their website; Daz was basically a re-implementation of poser with a few missing premium features.

Daz inherited the file structure of poser, which was from the outset badly implemented (my opinion) here is what I base that opinion on:

Poser, contained and still contains a Figure folder; this folder contains 'figures' i.e. humanoid skeleton based models but also expands to include, animal figures, and ... clothing, hair, buildings and well just about anything with a 'skeleton' .. yes buildings can have a skeleton, who knew?

Poser also contained a folder for props, this folder also contained humanoid objects ocassionally but also clothes, hats, jewlery, animals, buildings, hair (yes HAIR) and lots of other models the only difference was they 'generally' didn't contain a skeleton and thus weren't posable.

Of course the figures with a skeleton could be posed, and for this there was a pose folder at the base of the content tree. Rather than assocating specific poses with specific objects that could actually use them, posers default structure forced the user to navigate the the base of the content runtime tree and track-down by name manually the poses that were associated with the correct skeleton, of course some humanoid objects with similar bones could sometimes use parts of poses, but not for all bones defined meaning that poses for V3 would only partially function for V4 etc,. It was very confusing.

In order to add to this confusion, poses (pose files) were also used to set material options. But again these were not associated with the items that could use them, they were often in folders named after the content creator and then with a separate texture set name that was difficult to link to the figure set it would work with. Poses were also named unhelpful names such as shoes1.pz2 and shoes2.pz2. Which when you have 5 sets of shoes starts to create a logistical nightmare (just add time). Add to this the addition of a materials folder for only effecting a single material ... at least I think thats what it does I never use it.

But it didn't stop there, the pose folder also contained/contains Morph Injections and Removal poses, for adding in those essential morphs, of which V3 had hundreds and so contained batch import all morph files.

Oh and don't forget the Hair folder, that sometimes contains hair figures and sometimes hair props, but these may also be found in the figures folder or the props folder depending on how the artist was feeling at the time of the installer distrubution.

OH! and the Face(Expressions) folder, that also contains morphs, or poses sometimes, but again why not put them in the pose folder?

Then there was the light folder, which occasionally contained some generic light sets an artist may have decided to include with their product (of course lights where incompatible between poser and daz for sometime, and since the release of reality plugins and iray maybe that true again), and the same goes for the camera folder that was very occasionally used.

The least said about the scene folder the better, because its use a storage for 'preloaded' complete scene was laughable. Mostly people would create their own and save them elsewhere but most preloaded scene were loaded either from the props folder (as a preload/complete set icon) or maybe from the figure menu?

Of course you could move these sets around and reoganise them yourself, which is what I occasoinally do (with 10 years worth of accumulated items, props, freebees and things I've made myself this is no small feat).

I personally organise everything I can into the figures folder and in this folder i have my own subfolders for Scenary, Animals, Poses, Humans etc.. Inside Humans I have V3, V4, M4, Genesis, Etc Inside V4 for example I have Clothes, Poses, Characters, etc inside clothes I have all clothes belonging to V4 and in each subfolder as a set of clothing I have the associated Mat (materials folders relating to material poses for that clothing set), it takes hours to do but you only have to do it once... right?

But this is only half the story of horrors, the other half is a chimeric monster created by Daz themselves, in an attempt to improve the badly organised poser system daz created their own content tree structure... I can't begin to describe the horror of this one. There are Enviroments, Shaders, Scripts, Presets of various types hidden deep in seemingly unrelated folder trees, I mostly leave this side of the content tree untouched unless I really have to fish something out of it.

Then there is the search bar.... a god send? not quite, its slowly improving over the course of the 10 years its been in development, but it rarely finds items unless you give them their full name, searching for shoe will turn up lots of shoes but also materials for shoes and other bits and bobs you didn't need.

And finally, seeing as I'm letting off steam, lets talk about the items you downloaded 8 years ago onto a hard-drive that crashed and you transfered across only to find the directory structure was different to before, and now when you load the item it asks where to find every geometry .obj file, and every texture which you have to manually search for... and sometime it'll say "I can't find shoes.obj" you'll click the locate button.... and it'll be there... right there in that folder. you'll click ok and it'll carry on like it didn't just ask you a retarded question.

Will this nightmare every be sorted out, I doubt it because may failed attempts have been made over the years to improve the content mangement system... but just look at it today. LOOK AT IT!

What can be done?

In my opinion first a program that scans for broken unlinked geometry/texture and fixes them would be a good start rather than having to do this manually by opening note pad and search replacing all the wrongly written texture and geometry file paths. Secondly, a program that looks for all assocated item, ie: figures with materials and poses that only relate to them and links them so that you can load a piece of clothing right click it and select one of its matierial sets from the list of (eg 20) compable able materials... same with poses. This would be a good start.

 

pwiecek

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/runtime-repair/50760/

 

SpottedKitty

I'm afraid a lot of your questions can be answered with "someone discovered a hack that worked" or "it seemed like a good idea at the time" coupled with "it never quite completely went away". I've been using D|S just a bit longer than you have, and a lot of the hiccups date way back to the time of Poser 4 — that's the feature set the first version or two of D|S seems to have been aimed at. P4 was a lot more limited in its content capabilities than the last few D|S versions, and a lot of the hacks and workarounds developed to let us use a really big and varied content library don't really mesh well with the CMS/Smart Content/database system that D|S uses now. It doesn't help that in the first couple of versions of D|S there wasn't really a standard arrangement for different types of content...

Roboman28

Daz Studio organises better than this in many respects. Matts are usually associated with clothes characters and both are stored within their respective people folder. Things are never going to improve because of the need to retrospectively work with existing runtimes. At least you can sort out your own Content Library irrespective of how messed up the file directory structure is.

Subtropic Pixel

Another messy thing is that your folders can get messed up/changed.  I think this happened a year ago with a new version of DIM or DS, or something.  I basically ended up with two sets of folder structures and half of my library was not accessible.  What a mess.

I ended up un-installing EVERYTHING in my runtime, then changing DIM to point to the correct folders, then re-installing EVERYTHING.

Luckily for me, I keep a 200GB partition for all of my DIM downloads and I don't delete anything from it, so no re-downloads were needed; just a bucket of popcorn and a good movie to watch while DIM went and reprocessed all of those uninstalls/reinstalls.  Yuck.

I am still wrestling with what to call my categories.  "Figures", "People", "Actors", and "Characters", all of those things as they appear in the content database seem to describe the same things, differentiated only by this vendor liking one over another and another vendor doing it all differently.  Why have so many things that are the same, yet filed away differently?  And Props vs. clothing vs. accessories.  Again, all the same stuff.  Materials.  It's a wonder I can find ANYTHING at all.

We need a new hierarchy, a new standard that everybody can agree on.  This can't be that hard.  We have relational databases for everything else in life; why not this?

For example, Figures could include people (naked generic persons of human or alien origin.  I'm thinking "Michael", "Victoria", etc), Actors (more specific people with identifiable characteristics that could be employed in different works, such as Bruce Willis), Characters (a person with clothing and accessories and even more specific/atomic in nature).  I'm thinking characters would be like "Indiana Jones" or maybe even prefixed with the actor:  "Ben Kingsley/Ghandi" to help separate them from other versions of that character.  Animals could be a classification alongside or underneath "Figures".  The point is that this needs careful consideration so that consistency can be maintained and enforced going forward.

Likewise, Props could be split into further classifications such as "clothing", "accessories", "devices", "plants", etc.

The DIM is a database.  This shouldn't be that hard!  But the database has been poorly designed over the years, so nothing is consistent, the relationships are broken (were never there), and nothing makes sense to us real human beings.

It's never been developed, and is still stuck in the primordial goo era.

I would take this on, but DAZ probably can't afford me. 

Gr00vus

For Studio, I let the content managment process run, and then use categories/categorize to create my own organizational hierarchy. Whenever I add some new content, I categorize it appropriately as I see fit. Then it's always where I expect it to be. A nice thing about categories is that you can have items belong to multiple categories.

WendyLuvsCatz

fixmypcmike

Content Library > Products does that, DIM will even create those if there isn't metadata.