Request: Add a "resource type" tag to VAR meta.json

[venkman]

Because I'm slightly unhinged and like to punish myself, I've been working on an application that goes through my AddonPackages and tries to sort them into subdirectories based on type. Plugins, Looks, Clothing, Hair, Assets, and then regular old "scenes".

The goal is basically to try to weed out all the sample scenes that come with looks and clothing and whatnot, and have the actual playable scenes exist in their own directory.

The problem I'm slowly realizing is that there just doesn't seem to be a good, quick and dirty way to determine what a .var is that is 100% accurate.

For example, it's trivial to infer that it's clothing/hair/plugin if that's the only "resource type" specified in the meta.json file. But, once a creator adds a scene, or audio, or an extra asset, this becomes *much* more difficult. I can still generalize for a lot of packages, but not 100% of the time.

As such, my suggestion would be to add a new tag to the meta.json for packages that tells you flat-out what kind of resource it is. For existing packages on the hub - this could be done automagically if downloaded through the hub browser by modifying the package JSON on-the-fly and inserting the necessary tag. Or, I suppose it could be done on all of the hub resources themselves...

Either way, I think this would be invaluable not only for developers like myself, but also for future versions of the package manager and a lot of the other VAM UI. Instead of just guessing what to show when browsing for a plugin or a scene, VAM can know for *sure* which scenes to show. And if a user is looking for a demo scene for a particular look or plugin...well...that could be in it's own "demos" section or something.

 

[ZRSX]

Yes, that is indeed much harder to identify after download. There is no way to tell in a package if the scene is the important part or if it's only a demo for the other things.

But I disagree on isolating the demo scenes: a scene is really more convenient to access & try the resource you've downloaded on the best conditions (proper lighting & arrangement). You should only separate the demo scene when it would add extra dependencies.

The categorization could be done just fine without this anyway:

• it could be done "automagically" on the Hub: since the creator has to make to choice or which category will be the most suitable on the Hub, the info could be taken from there
• or with an additional info to input while in the VAR builder page (the creator would have to make the choice of category a little bit earlier).

The 2nd option adds another thing to do in the VAR builder page, which can be already quite confusing. But it would work for all resources, not only those coming from the Hub.


FYI, I'm not sure if you're aware, but there is already a categorization within VAM:

I'm not sure how it's made, but it seems this is done based on the package content and a package can be in multiple categories.

 

[venkman]

Yes, that is indeed much harder to identify after download. There is no way to tell in a package if the scene is the important part or if it's only a demo for the other things.

But I disagree on isolating the demo scenes: a scene is really more convenient to access & try the resource you've downloaded on the best conditions (proper lighting & arrangement). You should only separate the demo scene when it would add extra dependencies.

The categorization could be done just fine without this anyway:

• it could be done "automagically" on the Hub: since the creator has to make to choice or which category will be the most suitable on the Hub, the info could be taken from there
• or with an additional info to input while in the VAR builder page (the creator would have to make the choice of category a little bit earlier).

The 2nd option adds another thing to do in the VAR builder page, which can be already quite confusing. But it would work for all resources, not only those coming from the Hub.


FYI, I'm not sure if you're aware, but there is already a categorization within VAM:
View attachment 122573
I'm not sure how it's made, but it seems this is done based on the package content and a package can be in multiple categories.

Pretty sure the package manager is just doing it based on the directories contained within, which again, can get messy, because it's more or less just making educated guesses, versus "for sure" showing every var that was uploaded to the hub as a clothing item or scene, etc.

And I totally agree, a lot of demo scenes are very useful for testing/examining how stuff works or just getting ideas. But, at the end of the day, I still feel like it would be a useful feature to have *some* mechanism to definitively sort/find content beyond guessing based on what's in the folders. Or, heck, maybe just implement a more rigid naming convention for certain files, so that a demo scene is *always* named "demo" or something like that, similar to fanart in Plex.