Question Smart and fast ways to bring in personal adjustments when a scene got updated by its creator?

[test255]

So I have a favourite scene creator who not only makes great scenes but also update them like once a few months. It is a fantastic thing of course but also a bit of pain for myself because I do a lot a modification, such as:

- Removing/changing morph values in EACH animation in timeline to prevent unnatural or downright horror looks on my own appearances
- Adding in plugins and special triggers in timeline to fix problems with positions
- Change lighting
- Add in new buttons and their triggers
- Modify some animations
- Adjust plugins settings
- Last but not the least, implement my own customized appearance and adjust the looks

These all take hours or even days to make (although it's a lot of fun), and every time a scene gets an update, I have to manually change everything again.

So I am curious, for those who do heavy modding in scenes, are there smarter ways to implement old changes to an updated scene faster? What are some must have tools?

Note that I am aware that:

- I am actually thankful that VAM is easily modified on the fly, so even if I missed some personal fixes, it can be implemented immediately when I discovered one when playing
- I know many changes can be made into presets, but unfortunately probably not for things like Timeline morph changes
- Many problems and adjustments only take a lot of time to investigate and testing but once a solution is found, it is relatively quick to implement in future.

Thanks!

 

[murn]

Smart and fast answer No. You'll have to redo. You can save plugins that you have adjusted as a preset and add them back to the scene but that can end up screwing adjustments the creator has made especially if it was in the timeline or if they have triggers linked to other plugins in use. You know of everything else.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I do a lot of this too. In a lot of cases, I can save pose presets that fix position problems with custom looks. If there's a button for each sequence, or animation, then it's easy to add a trigger to load the pose preset to that button. This sometimes doesn't work if the "control" node is in the timeline. You can save poses in timeline, but I find this a fragile approach. It's too easy to break timeline, IMO.

If you add plugins to a scene, one way to transfer that is to temporarily delete all other plugins from the old scene, then save a plugin preset. You can merge load that plugin preset to the updated scene. There might be issues with the naming of the plugins, tho.

 

[Damarmau]

what I have done in the past that can be very hit or miss is for some of the old sxs4 scenes that I had modded significantly I would open the scene json from his new versions and copy just the added animations into my modified scene.

Actually, the opposite way, I would copy my existing animations from my modded json and then paste these over the matching animations in new scene json. The other way you wouldn’t bring over all the new buttons and additional scene edits. You might have to do some creative merge loading (remove everything except lights) to bring in any modded lights for example.

This was before I was animating lights, buttons and spawn cameras though so I’m not sure it would work now. Also I’m not sure if things will play nice if all the timeline targets are not the same (additional atoms or triggers).

If you are going to attempt this very hacky solution make sure you are using notepad++ which will help and to make backups of your originals in case you copy an extra comma or screw up the syntax and break your scene.

This is probably the only way other than exporting out all the animations and then importing them into your modded scene through timeline (unless there is a batch export/import function?). It has been a while since I used timelines import/export so not sure how it works when there is already existing animations. This also does nothing for adding in new ui buttons or anything else involved in the added animations.

In the end there really is no easy solution to this other than waiting until a scene is not going to get more updates?

 

[atani]

That interest is probably the reason for a lot of users to transition from players to scene creators. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, because scenes can be made in so many ways, editing them efficiently requires a good understanding on how they're put together and from there devise a strategy that could be efficient for the goal. Annoyingly, the strategy for one scene can be very different for another.

TL&DR
No easy universal solutions as stated

Longer read
The more experienced creators tend to save themselves work and time by reusing content and following their own patterns and structures. If you often redo the work of a specific creator, chances are that you'll be accustomed to how things are done in his/her scenes, and in most part you can potentially reuse the strategy for that creator's content.
Hopefully the creator also anticipated that people may want to change things and made life easier for them, and this makes a huge difference. Fortunately most creators are happy to hear that people like their scenes and would like to customize them more easily, so telling them that could also convince them to improve customisation in later updates. Naturally, there can only be so much customisation flexibility baked in, and it should not be detrimental to the scene maker in that it becomes too complex and time consuming to include that. Anyway, some words to the creator on your intentions can go a long way to finding that balance.

Enabling flexibility in scene design is beneficial for the creator as well. It takes more effort at start to try to anticipate future changes and ideas, but I think that in the long run, if the scene structure is flexible it saves a lot of time and effort when experimenting and creating new scenes. In my scenes I've over time made them more resilient and reusable by separating triggers from animations, person actions from environment, using a layer approach for the parts, etc. It's not that they break less only, but also that they are easier to fix. My focus is for me to save time and have more flexibility in the scene, but another user can also benefit from that approach. It's a win-win result I think.
One more time the advice, let the creator know about you like his/her scenes and edit them to enjoy them more. They may find ways to make the scenes more easily adjustable knowing there's interest.