Question Var dependencies rabbit hole

[Motoyo]

I was WAY WAY too overloaded with "Give me all the vars!" path and was up to 120GB VaM folder.

So started over, fresh install, put in just the basics of what I really liked, and ran the package manager to search for missing vars. Hmm like 40 missing OK copy them over.
Redo the search...just about as many missing. Because the ones I needed, need others...and repeat 4 times. STILL missing a few dozen new ones.
Because var #1 needs var #2, that needs var #3, and it needs var #4...ad Infinitum it seems..haha.
Now i got 2x the scenes in my list, many I dont want because the thing I needed for dependancy was a single part of a huge 1GB+ var with scenes and props etc.
Best example, I am not into Futas. But I got like 15 scenes of them now because some other var I did like depends on it for something in it.

It seems there MUST be a better way to do/handle/manage this besides "Ok 10gb of vars I wanted, is now 50gb of cascading dependencies."
Digging into the vars, quite a few have duplicate morphs/other things that others have, but since the first var used var 'X', even though 'Y' has it in it..I need both. And now 'X' needs var 'Z'...(and so on).

 

[Reanimator]

I agree. Apparently I made a morph edit to a character in one of my scenes, and when I used that character again in another scene, it makes the first scene dependent just because of 1 morph value or something. It would be nice if VAM could automatically detect and correct those sorts of things. I also seem to have a lot of duplicates of files that are included in multiple VARs. Seems like those could all just reference one file in a specified location to keep things clean. Maybe we'll get an update at some point to fix that stuff.

 

[MacGruber]

That's why I usually split plugins and demo in separate VARs. So I can use dependencies in the demo, without cluttering up decencies for anyone using my stuff in their scenes. Also no scenes showing up in the scene browser. Of course its more work for the creator, especially if you do repeated updates for something.

 

[RandomVAMUser]

There is no simple fix, we can only hope VAM v2.x will find solution and get it right from get-go.
Or find ways to block people to upload individual/extracted morphs if there is already .var uploaded on hub with those morphs (if v2 gonna use var system).
Or just cross-check morphs inside all .var files and show only ones from .var instead extracted dupes (but that still doesn't solve load/space issue).


Let me share my PoV on this topic, since i believe it's bigger issues then people think it is (atleast when it comes to vam v1).
The true reason for those "rabit holes" in vam v1 that people have with
all dupes (morphs, hairs, clothings (eyes, eyes, eyes -.-)
and unnecessary dependencies are:
1) VAM development (historically speaking)
2) Content Creators (for morphs, clothing,..all custom assets/stuff)
3) Enduser/Community (look sharing, bad/messy .vars, questionable morphs...)

let me try to expand each point:
1) Just to be clear i don't blame development team for it, don't get it twisted.
But it is somewhat true, the development of vam is kinda responsible for it (dupes), atleast historically speaking.
Because few versions back (1.18/1.19 and prior) we didn't have hub system or .vars,
we used "save/scene" with imports to morph/AUTO with .vacs & stuff (and before there was another legacy system, i think, idk, i only started with 1.18.2).
And even now there are still people with those ancient vam clients with extracted morphs that are uploading/sharing stuff.
That's the issue (more about it on reason 3).

2) By content creators i don't mean users that share only looks, but those that develop/port actual "content" (assets, clothing, hair, morph, skins...whatever).
There are so many active content creators with old content still crawling on vamresources/reddit and they can't be bothered to revisit/port them to .var/hub
I mean if they have like 5 hair mods how hard is to just combine it into "hairpackVolumeXYZ.var" and upload it to hub (or external as long is var type).
Instead people use old non-var mods and upload them inside var (since there is no .var to point to in the first place) and there you have it, dupes.
For love of god just revisit it, make it more simple for end user, free or paid content, all of it, just port it to var.

Lets not talk about wrong licensing, just ignore that topic for now
(not early-access but actual paid content .var under CC-BY license instead of PC, even more confusion for users that wanna start sharing stuff).
Also creators that make "ultra" var packs (including their Grandma) with stuff not everybody gonna use but they still need to download entire var to point properly as dependency for scene/look they wanna share.Instead separate it a little (put Grandma aside for next var pack),
so some people strip those "big" vars (including me) and take what they use and upload (guess what) as another dupe.

3) Like i said, (reason 1) there are people with extracted morphs (from previous vam versions or just intentionally/unintentionally extracted vars)
then they upload looks using extracted morphs (most commonly among all of them reloaded morphs) even if they have spacedog or oeshii reloaded.var installed it won't works since its not from var(doesn't point to var, can't compare var versions, nothing, so just dump it online again, who cares, not your problem) then they have all questionable morphs (are they free? old paid morphs? ...only god knows)
instead of just using morph merger? (i know, i know, don't like it either...kills any customization afterwards, but still better then dupes),
even if they morphmerge it some people might not use it right (with disabled emotes and stuff).
Same applies to other stuff (with clothing/hair) when they build/share messy .vars that use extracted stuff or they don't know how to use dependencies
that can be pointet back to my reason 2.


I think var was the way togo, to reduce overall size and simplify things, it was good on paper (if you ignore users with old clients (1.18/1.19 or older).
I know there are people with vam size of 200-300GB...im sure that can be reduces to 150-225 easily (if you kill all dupes, ignore Cache).
If only hub/var system works as intended, but nothing/nobody is perfect and we can only hope vam/hub v2 will get it right.

That's just my opinion and reason why i don't download vars automatically anymore (in client),
only manual inspection (if i see about 100 extracted reloaded morphs, move to bin and move on).