Has Daz 4.7 changed anything about morphs?

deslea

I have a free morph for Genesis 2 Female that I put up about a year ago on DA, and it has never had a problem. (It's your standard "merge the zip file into data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 2\Female\Morphs" kind of setup).

In the last month, after thousands of people have used it no problem, I've suddenly had a few say it doesn't work. I had assumed it wasn't 4.7 related because there's no mention on the Documentation page of any change to morphs, and initially thought someone just had a weird setup or wonky install, but it is now starting to look like 4.7 is the common denominator.

I'm in the middle of producing a script-based product and reluctant to upgrade to 4.7 until it's done, so I can't reproduce at this stage. Can anyone get me started by telling me whether 4.7 in any way changed either where a morph file is kept, or how it is parsed?

Many thanks.

Edit - the morph is saved as compressed, if that makes any difference, and it has special characters in the filename and morph name and label, which was previously permitted.

fixmypcmike

I'm not aware of any changes, but it's always possible that something which was technically off-spec but wasn't checked in the parsing process before is now being checked and rejected. Do you have any details on the way in which it isn't working? Is it possible to easily create a version without special characters for them to try?

deslea

Thanks for this.

The good news is, it's fixed, and it was definitely something to do with the exclamation marks.

The bad news from a broader dev perspective is I can't figure out what. My user tested three files:

1. One with !! in the filename and !! in the morph name/label. (This one was the same as the original, just uncompressed).
2. One with a standard character filename and !! in the morph name/label.
3. One with a standard character filename and standard character morph name/label.

I expected one of the following scenarios:

- Can't handle !! in the filename, in which case 2 & 3 would work.
- Can't handle !! in the name/label, in which case only 3 would work.
- Can't handle !! in either the filename or the name/label, in which case only 3 would work.

Weird outcome: My tester reported that 1 & 3 worked, while 2 didn't, which doesn't seem to make sense. The only thing that might make sense is if there is a separate problem with a mismatch between filename and morph name, which makes no sense - surely that would break a lot of morphs.

I played it safe and used 3 for my updated version. So my problem is solved, but it raises some questions about the behaviour of morph files in Daz 4.7 more generally. Food for thought for the devs. I do have a paid product out in the wild with exclamation marks in one of the morph names, so if any further information on this turns up I'd love to know about it.