Frankly it blows my mind that all content, looks, scenes, clothes, dependencies etc simply exists in a single .var format. We really need a content hub that lets us see and sort our addons folder by scenes and characters.
Have you really thought about that, and checked the var files? By "checked" I mean, really checked... looked how the vars are made, how the content is handled in VAM and how the creators are handling their content?
I'm gonna "summarize" the wider underlying issue mentionned in the quote from
@everlaster, but in VAM1.
An example we were discussing with the team recently:
My "working" version of VAM is the one with the most content, but I'm very picky on what I get. That being said, I have around 100/120 pages of clothing. From there, being a big fan of cool panties, from what I gathered, I have around 25/30 pages of those.
Now, if I hit the tags and check
panty or
panties, the final number of pages is... drum roll... 4. 4 pages, and one of those is only vanilla content made by Meshed. Which means that, from 29 pages of community made panties, if I filter by tag, I only get 3 pages.
What I'm saying here is that: the tools exists in VAM to ease the life of the end-user, yet, creators don't even take the time to properly tag the resource. You could make the best search engine possible... if creators/users don't tag properly, your search engine or filtering system is pointless.
Now, scenes or characters... what does this mean? Let's take "character" for instance... what is a character? It's the var file name? It's the legacy look file name? It's the appearance preset file name? Is it a scene?
You see where I'm getting at? There are 4 ways to save a character in VAM 1, how do you identify a character?
VAM 1 is the result of an iterative development that has know several ways of saving data. It still handles legacy content so people not really reading or trying to understand the "current" ways of saving/sharing assets are still using old methods.
And you don't even have to think about the var system, in general, people are really bad at naming/organizing their assets.
So maybe it
"blows your mind", but the var system is a pretty clever and versatile system. With a simple system like this, people already have a hard time tagging their content properly, managing what's inside a package, and naming stuffs to ease search... imagine having a specific type of package for every single type of resource... this would be even worse.
If you look at creators who are doing a proper job at this, you can easily find proper dependencies from a single resource. A character properly released shows its dependencies and what scenes use it.
All that said, I won't say that searching through the game can't be improved. And I think it probably will at least a tinsy bit : )
But you have to understand that the completely "sandboxy" or "modding" style of VAM, with a really open way of creating, whatever you want, however you want... even if you make absolutely no effort learning the "best practices"... makes the task very hard.
I remember a discussion a long time ago with someone saying "the search engine in the game is crap, I can't find a character if I don't recall its name or the creator name in my 1.5TB of vars".
You can't succeed in pleasing people who think you can get a result from a situation like this.
You want the search engine to answer to "tall male character with gray hair and a big nose" in 1.5TB worth of data? We fall back on the same issue: if creators haven't tagged the character with "gray hairs", "tall", "big nose", you won't be able to get any hit.
Even if I agree, UX can be improved on the search... most of the results you'll get only depends on the ability of the creators to make their content "searchable" if you know what I mean
And I haven't dived into that "1.5TB" issue, where people expect a search engine to search fast, and answer to every possible weird search scheme in 25000 vars.
