Male_M3dia posted at 8:52AM Mon, 10 August 2020 - #4396486

wolf359 posted at 6:19AM Mon, 10 August 2020 - #4396462

Not sure how "open" the source is when you can not have a stand alone installer that you can archive & share as you can with Blender installers.

Well if you set up DIM not to delete the installer files you can back those up. Also there are fewer things that you can send to blender than you could with other bridges because of the license.

Like the exact post on 'rotica... it comes down to centralizing, resources and amount of support. It makes more sense to set things up so it's easier to support and install (though it will never be perfect for everyone) and use those freed resources for development.

And this was covered in the conversation I was having about this with someone over at Renderotica. I have never used DAC Central or DIM, so I admit I'm unfamiliar with exactly how they work. One user explained to me that currently you can configure DIM to retain downloaded ZIPs after it downloads and installs your product(s). (My understanding is that it would otherwise delete these files after installation.)

Most likely, a future version of DIM will simply no longer have the option to retain downloaded files. It would download what it needs to install your content and then immediately (and irretrievably) delete everything afterwards. After all, it would make no sense to eliminate manual downloads only to leave that channel open in DIM. It would be like locking your doors but leaving all of your windows wide open. Whether DAZ would announce this change or say nothing about it at all until someone notices and complains is anyone's guess. (And my guess is, they wouldn't say shit about it until they absolutely had to.)

Only a true die-hard or an absolutely compulsive personality would be motivated to dig through their installation to copy off the files and folders they need to construct an archive by hand, but the vast majority won't.

Now imagine a year or two after DAZ has migrated a majority of its traffic onto its clients. The manual downloads are going or are gone, and DAZ is perhaps getting ready to roll out some new big ticket items (Genesis 9 if they haven't already come out, or perhaps Genesis 10). The damage has already been done for anything that's already been released, but DAZ may draw a line in the sand at this point and say "no further". You go to log into DAZ's site or to fire up DAZ Studio, and you get slapped in the face with a newly updated EULA -- again, with absolutely no warning and no way to access your content until you agree to DAZ's terms. They've done this before, and they will do it again at some point. And imagine if that EULA reimposes the content encryption. (Keeping in mind that DAZ has never admitted its mistake, has never apologized for it, and has not promised not to do it again at some point.)

As I said in the other thread, I think that those of you who choose to remain with DAZ are about to be boxed in.