VaM 1.x Creators, please stop releasing scenes with Life.13

[SlimerJSpud]

Life.13 had a bug where pose morphs were stored in appearance presets. Life.14 fixed this. As I noted in this thread, there is also a problem with duplicate morphs that can make people look funny. Having both Life.13 and Life.14 installed causes a problem. As long as people keep releasing new scenes with Life.13, and people click Download All, they will have this problem. The solution is for all scene creators to check the plugins they use and make sure the ones they are using are the latest ones, granted some exceptions.

The best technique is the one @RunRudolf uses where the morphs are kept separate from the plugin, and the plugin can just use the latest version so there's no such problem. We can't expect all plugin creators to rewrite everything to follow this example, but it is a good example of how it should be done.

 

[hazmhox]

I'm gonna check if we could "depreciate" Life 13, or at least prevent download.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

That would be good. At least then, Package Builder should flag it as not available. There's still a problem with existing scenes that call Life.13. They might lose the hub-hosted flag, and the old plugin will keep showing up in the missing dependencies list.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I've been thinking about this problem, as it's a big annoyance. I have a proposal that doesn't break anything (I think) and doesn't require any changes to Vam1.x. On the screen where you upload a new var, or an update to an existing one, there's a scan of the dependencies to see if everything is hub hosted. What if you made that scan also flag old versions of plugins with a very stern warning that the scene could create problems. Make them click on the message to acknowledge the risk. I'm sure for most scene creators, it's simply an oversight to use the old versions, or they just want to stick with what they know and not take the effort to update. A warning from the hub website might scare them into updating.

There are some special cases where a plugin creator has obsoleted the old one and made one with a new name, but the old ones still exist. Tittymagic has been superseded by Naturalis, and AutoGensGape has been superseded by OrificeDynamics. There may be others. We probably shouldn't prevent download, but if these cases could also be flagged, it would help.

 

[atani]

Honestly, I see little risk in packing a VAR with "latest" for the plugins.
Sure, this default is a "safer" option. Maybe a plugin used will introduce breaking changes some months or years after the resource is released. So what? No one will die because of that.
In the mean time everyone has a million versions of Timeline, perpetuates problems like Life.13 or Ascorad morphs v9, etc.

 

[hazmhox]

It's not a fix sadly Slimer.
You're assuming people read, and understand what they are reading. Which both are kind of stretch nowadays

But let's assume they do, I can tell you through experience that if someone still has Life 13 when releasing the scene, seeing that message won't make them consider repacking/updating as like most old farts around here, you know the average "packing quality" is not that great on average.

To top all that, I have discussed with quite a bunch of creators over the years, and creators and players alike, are (strangely enough) not up to date with either VAM or the plugins.
So unless you apply a strict "you can't use that" system, popping a text warning is not gonna make this go away.

And for "super seeded" plugins, this is a very subjective choice. Some people might prefer TittyMagic over Naturalis ( UX, features, overhead etc ), we can't out of the blue decide which plugins are obsolete and take over player/creators choices.

That's like if you did I don't know... a "HoinkHoinkStory" plugin which is VAMStory but different/better (however you see it) and because a big portion of the community shifts to it, now you're gonna popup a message to say "VAMStory should not be used". As either a user/creator or owner of VAMStory, I would be very pissed.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

Yeah, I was afraid of that, warnings being ignored. A long time ago, I worked at a company that regularly sent out physical media with software updates, docs, etc. We kept getting complaints from one customer "tres stupide" about bugs that had been fixed several releases ago. Finally one of the order fulfillment people went over to their site and found an entire barrel full of updates they never installed. He read them the riot act, and the noise level went down. I was only thinking of warning about newer versions from the same creator, not some HoinkHoink fork of Vamstory from somebody else.

A million versions of Timeline don't do any damage, as it doesn't use its own morphs. It's duplicate morphs that are causing me headaches.