Question Save scene contents to .var?

[Khazar Milkers]

Hey,

I would like to do a clean install of vam. It would be nice if I could save all the scenes I made in var files including all the referenced content. For some scenes, some references are fixable, but many still remain. Am I correct in saying that's because it references other var files?

How come it can't just take what it needs from the other vars and add it to mine? I'm a little confused, I have everything I need for a scene loaded in front of me, I wasn't expecting it to be this hard. Would it work if I unpacked every single var I have (hundreds)?

Similar question for clothes. Is there any way to transfer them over to a clean install? I don't even know which var most of them come from.

Thanks.

 

[TToby]

Hi, difficult question!
As you may have already read in some threads, there are many users who asking for a simple and safe to use content management tool. Unfortunately at this moment there is no tool I could suggest with a clear conscience.

The Var-file system builds on dependencies! It was developed, because in the old "Vac" system, every creator had included some popular stuff again and again, bloating up disk space enormous.
The idea is, instead of including those stuff, to just have a chain of dependencies, that are referring to each other.
Unfortunately this brings up a new problem: If you have created your own custom scenes and looks with contents included in Var-files, you have to keep those Var-files to not breaking your own stuff.
This might be OK until the point you have hoarded a larg ammount of those Var files, and normal users like us (not those few who made excel spreadsheets of their downloads) will inevitably loose track of those dependencies.

To answer some of your questions:
Yes, you can make Var files from your own scenes with the package creator. Please refer to guides like "how to make Var files". This will, according to the things I wrote above, NOT include all neccessary stuff from other Var-files, BUT it will automatically create a list of dependencies for your own scene. With that list(s) at hand, you can decide what to keep and what to drop.

Yes, you can unpack Var files and only copy the stuff you will realy need (a skin texture, for instance, or morphs) to the corresponding folder on your disk.
BUT this is something I would suggest only to very experienced user. This can screw up things, will lead to a lot of hard-to-find loose files locally in your VaM folder, and most likely it is against the creator's copyright. Don't share this stuff.

If you want to be on the safe side, you have to do this manually for every of your files. This is a lot of work to do.
If you want to know the origin of clothes or morphs, you can hoover your mouse- or VR-pointer over the name, and you will see the name of the corresponding Var stuff.

Until we might have a reliable management tool, you can do the following;
Do a clean VaM install in an other folder (you can have as much VaM installs as you like).
Then copy your own custom stuff over to this clean install, plus all the Var files you want to keep.
Then start Vam and take a look at the (long) error log and all the missing dependencies.
Now try to solve all those errors one by one. After some inevitable restarts, load your own custom scnes and looks and see if there are still some errors. If the error log is clean, you are ready. Watch your downloads from this day one, or you have to start over again.

You can also go the other way and move out all Var files from the AddonPackages folder, and move them in again, one after another, according to the error log.
This has the disadvantage of not having a fully working VaM installation as a fallback, if something may go wrong.
You may want to do this, if you allready have a lot of stuff locally installed in your "custom" folder (you will know if this is the case). No need to say, it is allways good to have a backup of your VaM stuff.

I hope this may help a bit.

 

[Khazar Milkers]

That was more than I could have asked for, thanks. Very elaborate and I understand everything you said. I stayed up all night messing around with this, I made several clean installs and tried some things. It seems you are right that there isn't any good way to keep VaM from being very bloated if you have more than 10 or so scenes with different models.

I've always had all the vars I downloaded myself in a seperate folder inside AddonPackages. I copied my folder with vars of girls (usually a scene) over to the clean install. There's about 150 I'd say. About 10 GB. So I went to find the missing ones on the hub in-game, the list is enormous. Downloaded them all, it's about 10 more GB.

I understand that the system is built using dependencies so that you don't have to have duplicates of everything. But it does come with a problem of its own, that you end up downloading an endless amount of stuff you don't need. I am not into anime whatsoever, but after doing this, there's a bunch of anime stuff in my clothing menu. Probably because they used one little morph from it in a look I downloaded, so it downloads the entire var that this 10 KB little morph came from.

If I understand correctly, the old vac system did do what I need. I have plenty of looks, I don't need any more. If I could simply have about 150 var files containing looks including everything needed for them, I would be a happy vammer. It would also be very nice if I could go into the clothing or hair menu, and check boxes on the ones I want to keep, and export them all as vars.

Maybe it has to do with preventing piracy, which I would understand, but this system doesn't really prevent it. I've been able to unpack paid content and include it in my var. It's just very cumbersome, because a lot of looks reference about 10 different vars.

I think the idea behind the var system is great, but it would be a huge improvement if instead of necessarily having to download the entire var that is referenced, it would be possible to download only a part of it. Or, if there was a function that unpacks everything used in the current scene to the relevant folders (textures, morphs, scripts, etc.). After that you can delete the var files. This would mean that in adittion to searching for the referenced item in the AddonPackage folder, the game would also have to search those other folders for the referenced files.

Edit: I just thought of something, what I described is a lot like torrents. You can download the whole thing, or you can check individual files. IdealIy I think in the package manager menu, under contents, it should have color coded which ones you have from this var (or torrent in the analogy), and which ones you don't. So in the meta file of the var it should mention which files are to be included in the full var.

 

[TToby]

I am still hoping for someone progamming an easy to use and safe all-in-one VaM content management tool (no collection of loose command line tools), where you can do exactly those things you have suggested.