Request: VAM CONTENT MANAGEMENT TOOL

TToby

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You all might know this:
- You have downloaded a lot of looks and scenes with even more dependencies to download.
- You have created a lot of own custom stuff like looks and scenes by using all that various stuff included in those downloaded Var files, like morphs, hair, clothes, plugins, looks, aso.
- You have created a lot of various presets that uses stuff from Var files, like appearance presets, cloth presets, plugin presets, aso.

After a while, those Var files will pile up and you are almost not able to decide which of them can be deleted without breaking something else. Only people who are extremely organized or users that don't create their own stuff might be able to handle this.

IMHO we desperately need some sort of VAM content manager, which will not only scan through all the Var files for dependencies, but also through custom created stuff in the "save" and "custom" folders, too.

- This tool should ideally scan for dependencies that are needed by other files (not the way around), and list them up in some way. For instance:
- "Otto.LillyLook.var" uses morphs from Var "A", skin from Var "B", hair from Vam "C", aso.
- The tool will ideally list up "Otto.LillyLook.var" in green as "save to delete" (maybe with a fat "delete" button next to it), but Var "A", "B" and "C" are listed up in red, because they are used by an other file (including user created stuff).
- Maybe files used by a lot of other files are listed in dark red, but files that are only used by one or two other files are listed in a light red colour. If you click on it, the tool ideally shows all the dependencies listed up, so you can decide wether it is worth to keep it for only one single mediocre scene or look, for instance. Otherwise I fear we might see most of the listing in red.
- The tool should show the file size, too (worth to delete or not).
- The tool must be able to scan user created looks (and (appearance) presets) and scenes, too, to find out which Var file can be deleted without breaking them!
- It would be great to know which of my hundreds of self-created environments, hairstyles or clothes are being used by scenes or looks, but I fear this would make the listing burst. Though, importing clothes, creating hair and environments are an important part of VaM, so I think they should be somehow considered later on, too. But at least with my more than 5000 morphs (pre-Var) this would become insane...
- The tool should be easy to use and to install... no need to install a python development environment thingy, Excel, a bunch of scripts, or something like this. Just click and run.
- The tool should therefore have a proper UI, no batch files with text output!

I know, this might be a lot of work with the VaM V2 at the horizon...
But it will most likely be another year or more untill V2 is fully usable with all functions.
Nevertheless, I would even pay some Euros for a tool like this (if it is good), and I bet a lot of others, too.
So this might be worth some thousands of Euros and/or a lot of fame.
 
Yeah a dedicated software to work outside of VaM would be great. Something to help organise stuff around without lag. This would indeed take a lot of work, and might be obselete once 2.0 is fully functional. I really hope 2.0 will handle content browsing better.
 
A tool as described would only reveal the severe crosslinking of scene vars we are experiencing now but not solve the problem. The reason is that there are too many vars which refer standard content like morphs, scripts etc. to other scene files instead of specific vars. So without fixing the scene json files there is little chance to get rid of unneeded vars. By doing so I now have a VaM which doesn't start with a lot of error messages but there still remains the problem of content being included in scene vars over and over again.
 
@Skimp You are right. That behavior wasn't planned when the Var system was developed. In a ideal world, each content creator would link standard stuff, or stuff allready published by other creators to a separate Var. Ideally each content creator would have to publish his stuff in separate Vars, like for instance one var for the skin, one var for the hair, one var for the morphs and one for the scene, if publishing a look in a scene. Nobody is doing this and, by the way, it would make the dependency lists explode!
You are right, to get rid of the doublettes and stuff being in a Var together with many other unused stuff, we would need a very mighty tool that could maybe "split", edit and move stuff from json files and vars.

The tool in my request wouldn't do so, but at least could provide us with a basic hierarchy overlook over all those Var files being dependencies of others.
At the moment, we have nothing to help us. Once you have collected a lot of stuff, it is almost too late to manually organitze all that different var files.
Despite I have stopped myself to mindlessly download each and every mediocre content, I even have more than 850 Var files. Not to mention all that countless looks and scenes I have made with the help of stuff being in various Var files.
 
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