I am new here so first off I would like to say that makehuman is awesome. I am very thankful for all the work that's been done and all the user contributed content is great.
joepal wrote:It is inferior. The difference being that the downloader plugin is able to correct path mistakes and normalize file names, even inside asset descriptors. One of the most common problems with assets is that a file is wrongly named as in having differences in capitalization, illegal characters in the file name or having an erronous path inside the descriptor. Add to that, that the asset downloader is able to correctly place the asset in the appropriate subfolder, and you will have a solution which is preferable in most cases.
A few points
I spent hours downloading assets individually and finally find out about this so called superior downloader plugin that I need to watch a video to figure out how to use in a thread started a month after I started downloading assets. Why can't you bother to put a link to it on this page?
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/content/user_contributed_assets.html
How can wrongly named asset work for the developer of the asset in the first place? Out of nearly a hundred manually downloaded and installed assets I haven't encountered any of these errors.
I did have trouble getting downloaded skins to work until I figured out that a separate textures subdirectory was needed, so your point about the downloader placing everything in the proper directories is only really valid because you don't have a standardized subdirectory format.
Compression. Not everyone has a superfast connection and some users still have metered service. It just took me 6 minutes to download everything for the Tactical vest, I zipped it, uploaded it to my box account, and downloaded the zip in 2 minutes.
Lastly where does this plugin go and what permissions will it require? I don't like the fact that I am required to give third party plugins 755 permissions to work on my Linux system and I don't like the fact that I can't install makehuman in the location I choose on my system.
If you think I am being too critical I apologize. I mean no offence to the developers or anyone who has made contributions, and I am sure there are good reasons for some of these things that are beyond my comprehension. Still I would ask you to consider this. Time is our most precious commodity, if it takes three times as long to upload content only one third as much will get contributed.