Identifying "free" content depending on paid resources

[Acid Bubbles]

There are several occurences of free resources (looks or scenes) that depend on paid content. While it's true that the resource itself is free, it's not exactly free from the point of view of the resource consumer. I'm wondering if this could be addressed somehow.

I have a similar issue, Timeline 4 is early access but I'd like to make scenes available for free that depend on it, so it's the same issue, it would not feel fair to mark it as free, but it's not paid per se either.

Some ideas:

1. Just have them in the "Paid" section
2. Tag them automatically (if in free + has non-free dependencies, tag it as "paid-dependencies"), note that this could also be useful for "unknown-dependencies", i.e. not in Hub)

Other ideas welcome

 

[hazmhox]

I was thinking about that the other night, and I realized that the "hub hosted-var" does more or less the job for that.

My goal was to make something free and hub-hosted to avoid the users thinking "nah I'm not gonna test the demo because I need external dependencies" (just because I was using an external content that was free but not hosted on the hub). So I got back on the content, created a scene myself with free converted content to compensate.

From a creator stand point, I think this only resume to "do you think about the way user consume your content". If yes, naturally you will find a way to create content that is available and doesn't force the user to pay something.

In you case you have two solutions :
- You can wait v4 to be available before releasing the scene.
- You can release it directly, and bump it when it is not in early access anymore with an update to remind users of this scene that is not "hub hosted" and free.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Yep in my case I'm cautious of dependencies, however I often see things like "this scene throws errors but it's ok you don't really need the dependency", so I think we have to account for authors who don't "care" (not saying that in a bad way) about the packaging, or just don't have the expertise.

I'll probably just wait, or release it in early access, but it would have been nice to have a way that solves it all.

Not a huge issue, I just stumble too often on packages like that.

 

[CitizenX]

Like hazmhox said, the Hub-Hosted Var tag will do the necessary work for you... While the package will show up on the Hub in the Free section, it won't have the Hub Hosted tag.

More significantly, it will NOT show up in VaM's in-game Hub browser if and when a user is looking through Hub Hosted packages (this is an option, and I believe the default one at that). And once 1.20.1 is released, I suspect very few people will download packages from the Hub outside of VaM. So practically speaking, someone browsing for fully-available, immediately downloadable free content is not going to see packages with paid/timed content.

And best of all is that if and when the early access resource is posted to the Hub, your original upload will automatically switch over to being tagged as Hub Hosted.

Though I do think it might be a good idea for us to flag "Free" resources that include Timed or Paid dependencies, just to offer users an obvious visual. The information is already there in the dependencies tab (license type of each is listed) but it's not obvious even if you know what you're looking for. I'll wait for @meshedvr to weigh in, but it would not be hard to add a visual for these cases.