Plugins VAMStory

[hazmhox]

Fair enough! I guess I mixed up plugins that don't have any "assets" included vs ones that do like VaMStory.

Personally in the past, when trying to "update" certain plugins that do not have such assets included (I dare say 95% of the plugins I use), they are almost always able to run seperate versions of the plugins instance next to each other in the same scene.
[...]

Yes, of course, if you don't have potential issues making plugins with different versions "live" in the same scene. That works.
But this is also tied to the way your work.

Even before making bigger plugins that included assets, I always used the automatic var system by removing the old versions. On top of that, I never, ever auto-download everything. I grab the dependencies manually when needed and I know what I'm using and which plugin I should update or not.
This ease the process because you don't need presets, you just need to auto-update the thingy : )

While I agree in the general sense, for people that have (allot) of scenes collected, either as .var files or as local /saves/scene/.json files you are forced to use method 2, described in that tutorial link you posted.

And even then, you cannot change the dependacy list of a .var file (Unless you manually dive into every single one with a text editor).

The reason I mentioned this is solely because of this simple button which gets recommended by about 90% of all vam scene appearance/scene creators to use oocasionally.

Nope. You don't need to update the files... VAM does the work automatically. But as you mention, IF and only IF you don't download everything blindly. You can do both, you just eventually need to spent a bit more time managing your content.

But you are right, the "latest" flag depends on what the creator does on the scene level. Since pretty much no one understands how it works... you end up having scenes requiring the old versions.

The reason why not going latest automatically is simply because meshed is clever: he knows that only a thin margin of devs will preserve legacy features/behaviors. If a plugin has any breaking changes in version 10, your scenes using the version 1 to 9 could be buggy af OR miss some original content that is not in version 10 or above.

This is a compatibility choice made to ensure you can play your scenes properly.
Ensuring legacy compatibility requires attention to detail and more work. And you're in a community which is weirdly in between a modding community and a game dev community. And a lot (to not say a majority) don't have game dev experience OR don't have the dev experience/patience/time/will/organization to keep a stable plugin over a lot of versions.

Hence that versioning system : )

 

[Voithe]

Ooooooh... now I see...

I think I'll have to rebuild my scenes from zero. Thank you.

 

[hazmhox]

Ooooooh... now I see...

I think I'll have to rebuild my scenes from zero. Thank you.

Haha!
At least you have found a new toy