Question Best practice for maintaining AddonPackages?

[Thatoshiriguy]

I've found quite a few posts about this, but not so many new ones, and not with clear answers.

Basically, it looks like most, if not all, of my VARs are loose in the AddonPackages folder. There are also some .jpg and some .vac.

I used a tool called VamUpdater, which updated and backed up some packages, in the backup folder it did this by creating folders for each creator.

I want to organise my AddonPackages folder so that there aren't so many loose .var files, in the hope that things might load faster (especially when searching for plugins).

What's best practice for this? Is there a tool that can automatically organise the contents?
What's the difference between "Custom" and "AddonPackages"?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[atani]

There's no best practice. All options are compromises between hhd space, VaM performance, error log, user or tool-based maintenance, downloading practices, etc.
The AddonPackages folder should only have VARs, jpg and vac are likely presets of some sort that shouldn't be there. These are meant to be in the Custom/something folder, depending on what they are:

Wiki Article - 08. File Types

VaM File Types .json The basic scene file for VaM is the .json file. Also used for Subscenes \Saves\scene \Custom\SubScene .vac Legacy compiled scene files. These are not commonly used anymore. Originally the scene file when packaged into a "vac" for sharing would compress the assets into...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[Thatoshiriguy]

What's best for VAM performance?

 

[atani]

The best is to have the lowest visual options possible and no other packages besides what comes with VaM, but obviously this is pointless. Everything is a compromise of some sort, best is meaningless.

A thing to do to have a reasonable performance is to not download and accumulate tons of crap. The more you have the more likely it will hinder performance.
Then there's optimizing resources, simmed clothing and hair have a big impact, and lots more.

 

[upwardpuddle]

J

The best is to have the lowest visual options possible and no other packages besides what comes with VaM, but obviously this is pointless. Everything is a compromise of some sort, best is meaningless.

A thing to do to have a reasonable performance is to not download and accumulate tons of crap. The more you have the more likely it will hinder performance.
Then there's optimizing resources, simmed clothing and hair have a big impact, and lots more.

Just starting fresh with vam on a new machine. My old one had a short and wasn’t running well, but I want to avoid doing what you said and acquiring a bunch of stuff. Instead I just want to use whatever I absolutely need for the scenes I want to finish making. I’m hoping I get a really good boost in performance.

 

[randomvamguy]

I've found quite a few posts about this, but not so many new ones, and not with clear answers.

Basically, it looks like most, if not all, of my VARs are loose in the AddonPackages folder. There are also some .jpg and some .vac.

I used a tool called VamUpdater, which updated and backed up some packages, in the backup folder it did this by creating folders for each creator.

I want to organise my AddonPackages folder so that there aren't so many loose .var files, in the hope that things might load faster (especially when searching for plugins).

What's best practice for this? Is there a tool that can automatically organise the contents?
What's the difference between "Custom" and "AddonPackages"?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Well, here's one more post to add to the no clear answers list. I like to create folders in my "addonPackages". I generally use the same sort of categories that the hub uses, ie looks, scenes, plugins, textures, etc. Not everything needs a perfect home, but certainly scenes, and plugins (those you will be looking for most often), and have subfolders under those for older versions, so when you're looking for timeline you don't get 20 of them. It's generally not difficult to identify a plugin in your list of addonpackages, or a scene, but other things will not be so obvious, because they were some kind of dependency. So have a folder for 'other'. Then when you're looking for your favorite things, and you click open to open a scene, or add plugin, you're going to select "addonpackages filtered" on the left and 'bam' there are your folders. it's not perfect, and it requires ongoing maintenance, ie downloading 100 packages from the hub over 6 weeks without doing any kind of organizing, as every package you download will have a dozen or more dependency, so just keep up with it.

 

[upwardpuddle]

t

Well, here's one more post to add to the no clear answers list. I like to create folders in my "addonPackages". I generally use the same sort of categories that the hub uses, ie looks, scenes, plugins, textures, etc. Not everything needs a perfect home, but certainly scenes, and plugins (those you will be looking for most often), and have subfolders under those for older versions, so when you're looking for timeline you don't get 20 of them. It's generally not difficult to identify a plugin in your list of addonpackages, or a scene, but other things will not be so obvious, because they were some kind of dependency. So have a folder for 'other'. Then when you're looking for your favorite things, and you click open to open a scene, or add plugin, you're going to select "addonpackages filtered" on the left and 'bam' there are your folders. it's not perfect, and it requires ongoing maintenance, ie downloading 100 packages from the hub over 6 weeks without doing any kind of organizing, as every package you download will have a dozen or more dependency, so just keep up with it.

This is really good advice. Thankyou. I’ve also read on here before that you can have multiple vam installs. If that’s the case, could you potentially have a special version of vam for a specific scene you want to create/use, with the just the plugins and asset VARs that you’d need to run it? I’d be interested to try it just to see how much performance changes, but I’m not sure if it’s even something that would work.

 

[Veyron_fan]

t

This is really good advice. Thankyou. I’ve also read on here before that you can have multiple vam installs. If that’s the case, could you potentially have a special version of vam for a specific scene you want to create/use, with the just the plugins and asset VARs that you’d need to run it? I’d be interested to try it just to see how much performance changes, but I’m not sure if it’s even something that would work.

You can have as many installs as you want. As its mainly just the addonpackages folder that affects performance all you literally need to do is have multiple of that folder inside your vam install and only have the 1 with the content you want to use at given time named correctly. I have 2 folders which I alternate the names of depending on what I'm doing, addonpackages and addonpackages1. One folder is for general use and has all my stuff I'm playing with in it, organised in folders mostly, and the other ONLY has the few .vars I absolutely must have to play a scene, which are unimaginatively in a folder called essentialvars. If you find a scene is very taxing and won't run well in the general install simply move it over to the addonpackages folder that only has your essentials, like certain plugins and favourite looks, and then swap the names of the folders around so the almost empty folder is named correctly as addonpackages and the folder full of all your shit is called addonpackages1. Now when you open vam it'll access the correctly named folder and only have the scene you want to run at max performance.

If you REALLY want to try and keep things running decently I suggest having folders inside the addon folder for fave looks, plugins/dependancies, clothes and morphs. Stuff you wanna keep just drag to the correct folder. Then you want to have an "archive" folder kept completely outside of VAM of all the scenes you like, organised by creator, and simply drag whatever 1s you fancy playing into the addon folder and leave the rest out. The ultimate goal here is to have it so you have a base vam that has all the stuff you always want to have, looks, clothes etc that you then add the scene folders to 1 at a time. Then when you add scenes you'll go to the hub and click download missing packages and all the stuff will go into the addon folder outside of your "keep safe folders" as individual .vars. When you decide your bored of those scenes you simply drag the scenes/creator folder(s) back to the archive, then simply select all the loose .vars and delete them all, minus anything you've found you want to add to you "keep safe folders" by dragging them into the appropriate folders. You're then back to your "base vam" with only all your fave stuff kept safe. Now repeat like before by dragging a new folder of scenes from archive to the addonpackages folder then going to hub and download required dependancies for the new set of scenes you've just put into vam and play. If you have slow internet this can be difficult as you need to redownload all the needed stuff each time you add new scenes to play. But you'll slowly start to realise what stuff seems to always be needed for different creators and add them to the keep safe folders so they dont need to be downloaded each time. Usually when I go to clear all the loose .vars before changing scene folders I order everything in the addonpackages folder by size and only delete everything under a certain file size. It's the number of .vars that affect performance, not the size, so keeping all the big 1's to avoid downloading them again while deleting hundreds of little ones is very effective.

Hope this makes some sense.

 

[kretos]

I want to organise my AddonPackages folder so that there aren't so many loose .var files, in the hope that things might load faster (especially when searching for plugins).

All vars under AddonPackages are read by VAM, so none "organisation" will help you in loading times. I use subfolders just to keep things tidy - also similar scheme as randomvamguy wrote.
If you want faster load times then use https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/var-browser.27150/. It's THE ONLY solution that allows to access immediately (without VAM restart or hard reset) all content and have VAM running smooth.

 

[JoorSupreme]

In my AddonPacxkages folder there are Vars that show up as plugins that say "Do Not Open". Should they be there, and if not, where?

 

[atani]

In my AddonPacxkages folder there are Vars that show up as plugins that say "Do Not Open". Should they be there, and if not, where?

Likely is just to tell a user to not use that file to load the plugin as it will give errors. Then again, I have no idea what kind of plugins you have, especially if you got them from outside the Hub.

 

[JoorSupreme]

Thanks, and Happy New Year!

 

[atani]

Happy New Year