Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Scanning the DAZ database is now obsolete

 I'm a Windows user myself, but the DAZ Importer still runs on Linux. The problem with Linux is that its file system is case sensitive, so e.g. Runtime/Textures and runtime/textures are different directories on Linux, whereas they are the same on Windows. To deal with these problem we previously had to scan the entire DAZ database, cf the post on Linux Revisited. Alas, this led to several problems. Scanning the database could take considerable time if many DAZ assets have been installed. Moreover, scanning is error prone because if you add new assets, they will not be found unless the database is rescanned.

Fortunately, these are now problems of the past. In the last commit, the relevant paths are scanned on the fly, meaning that a separate scanning step is obsolete. Having to look at several locations for an asset does have a price, but it seems to be a modest one. My initial tests indicate that importing files with "Case-Sensitive File Paths" enabled increases the load time with about 10%.

And please note that this is only an issue under Linux. Under Windows, and I believe Mac as well, file paths are case insensitive so the issue never arises.