Oh My, Oh My Oh My.

Reallusion, You are constantly highly encouraging us to enable Trial downloading in our sales.
You keep telling us how important it is to enable this for customers. So In all the uploads of my contents I have been enabling it.
Yesterday I got asked by a customer why they couldn't trial download my Superjumbo Afro Hairstyle.

So I did a fair bit of investigating in the pack but couldn't find anywhere for trial to be enabled. This is a pack of 11 versions of the hair.
I went and checked each item of the pack and they are all enabled for trial. But the pack of them cannot be trialed. I don't sell them singly, I only sell them all as a Pack.
In fact, 99% of what I sell are packs of several single Items where I don't sell the single Items.  I only sell them as packs because the pack is actually a single item that happens to be made from several parts that can only be uploaded as separate Items.
So that's what I do. Upload all the separate items of the single thing I am going to sell. Leave all those Items set to Hidden and add them all into a pack so I can sell them all as what all of them are together. Together they are a single item.

I then went and checked marketplace and I noticed no packs are enabled for trial, so I figured we cant do it. So I asked a friend and sure enough that is the case we cannot enable trial downloading in packs. 
I also found out that this has been requested from you several times and you just ignore us. You don't understand that the majority of what we sell are packs of several items used to make a single item.
You keep telling us how important it is for us to enable trial downloading for customers. You tell customers how easy it is for them to download trials before they buy but you wont give us the ability to enable it it in packs. 
Which then makes it look like we are bad to our customers because were not enabling trials.

Oh my Oh My oh My
Sigh


i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Just a "ditto" to this post - many of us have been pointing this out for some years now but the mechanism never changes.  Perhaps the software is unable to protect with watermark for trial once items are embedded in a pack - I have to assume that the current configuration does not have the ability to make items "within" a pack DRM protected with watermark when downloaded as trial.
But if that is the case and it's not something that can be changed by enabling this - then it's a feature that really shouldn't be promoted to such an extent.  The reality is that most items for sale in the Marketplace are "Packs" and not single items and it would not be feasible to present them as single items for sale. 


Alley

Alley is absolutely correct.... many of us have spent years trying to get RL to fix this & their replies usually make no sense in that individual items can be trialed, but not the pack.  Well, if you have a building kit, where every item depends on the placement of another item, individual item trials are as useless as mammary glands on a bull.....
Just saying, don't get your hopes up, Delerna, we have tried for years to get RL to fix the mess to no avail.

---

iClone Certified Content Developer and Author of the Pinky Frink® Adventure Series & the Pinky Frink® Learning Books
site: Granny J's 3D Attic SKYPE = grannyjsplace email: grannyj@grannyjs3dattic.com
MY RIG: GPU: Dual GeForce GTX 970M | CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)i7-5930K @3.50GHz| 32.00 GB RAM | OS: Win 7 Pro SP1 | DX11

Years?
Seriously, years!!!???
And Reallusion promotes it as a best practice?
Sigh.


So what do you do?  Set up a few individual items from the pack as stand-alone "trial" samples, and then if they like what they see, they buy the pack?

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
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Good to see comments on this.
I really don't want to get stuck into Reallusion. For the most part I totally appreciate what they have created. Reasonably good software that is reasonably priced.
However I have been a software developer for many years and the biggest thing I kick myself for is stating that it is not possible to do something.
Used to do that many years ago and have regretted it so many times because I have often had the thought of it floating around in my head and suddenly coming up with a way to do it.
So often. Now I work hard to not say can't do it anymore. Very often I find it was way easier to do than what my first thoughts suggested.

I get Reallusion may not correct this and I'm not really expecting it
But the thing is, if Reallusion really believes how important it is for us to make our content trial downloadable then surely they should see how much MORE important it is for them to give us with the ability to do it.
The most annoying thing for me is how I look bad to a customer who stated he loves my contents but regrets that i'm not providing trial downloads like Reallusion advertises.
I certainly want to get paid for the work I do making contents but the primary reason I do it is to try and make things that help people, including myself, to have whatever contents we need for making the video's we want. 
I am sure several of us marketplace developers feel the same. It's something we enjoy doing most of the time and making a bit of money from it is just a bonus.


i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

JustAViking.
Yes that is what I ended up doing with one of my Superjumbo hairs. I published one and priced it ridiculously so he wouldn't accidentally buy it.
But that confused him why I was charging so much for it
Sigh


i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Thank you for the feedback. We will look into this limitation and will update again when we have more news. 

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Hey Viking-
Nope, I don't set up a few individuals items, as a rule.  Take for instance my Master Builder Pack.....(seen here: https://city.reallusion.com/ContentPreview.aspx?i=JICe487a1d2b623df7b1&g= ), it has 425 different props that make up the pack.  Each one of those props is totally dependent upon the placement of other items in the pack.  I am certainly not going to publish 425 items as individual packs, because without trialing all 425, one would never "get" the overall view of what the pack is & what its intended use is. 
In addition, because for each pack we (developers) are required, at the minimum to have a 1920x1080 preview image & a 512x650 thumb, that means I would have to create another 850 images just to do this, and then spend at least a full day or more creating each & every item for individual sale in order for any type of trial. No customer is going to download 425 trials items just to preview a pack. And I am NOT going to spend my valuable time jumping through these hoops when all it would take on RL's end is some program coding to accommodate everyone. &Yes, several of us developers have been back and forth about this with RL for SEVERAL YEARS NOW. We have basically given up on the topic of trial content.
Now, if your (developer) pack has less than perhaps 5 items, it MAY be worth jumping through the hoops so folks can entertain trialling the content, but if your packs, as a general rule, have more items than 5, the extra effort never really gets reflected in sales dollars earned (many of us have been there, done it & have the T-shirt)....  Just saying, time is better devoted to developing new content & building your storefront inventory than dealing with the circus of trial content.

---

iClone Certified Content Developer and Author of the Pinky Frink® Adventure Series & the Pinky Frink® Learning Books
site: Granny J's 3D Attic SKYPE = grannyjsplace email: grannyj@grannyjs3dattic.com
MY RIG: GPU: Dual GeForce GTX 970M | CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)i7-5930K @3.50GHz| 32.00 GB RAM | OS: Win 7 Pro SP1 | DX11

Thank you Peter. Good to hear Reallusion will look into this. 

Here here with what Granny J said. on that publishing single items
I did that publish on one single item for this occasion only, but its definitely not something I will do as a general thing either. Another thing is I don't want to overload the viewing of my store.


And also totally agree with GrannyJ on the images. But I'm going to add another one bit to that. 
And I am going to add a new topic on that here

Reallusion, I promise I won't get crazy on complaining. 
For the most part I don't mind working with your marketplace. GrannyJ's comment just reminded me of this and thought I might as well say it too.
I used to just put up with it, it is your website afterall.


i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Indeed never understood this.  Surely if you trial enable everything in the package then by default the package should be enabled?
Anyhow I gave up trying to make sense of some decisions long ago and just ignore the features like this that serve no real purpose.  




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