User Skin file location probem, moving & backing up issues.

centreofengland · Wed Mar 18, 2009 7:26 pm

Hi, I have a request please.

Any chance you can make the location of user created skins (ggsk files) be stored in the project file as "relative to the project file" rather than absolute.
Read on and you will see what I mean.

A problem I have just encounted is that my vr tour uses a skin I have designed and I have kept my skin along with all my other project files in one location on my working drive (Drive S:)
Everything is working fine. I then made a copy of the whole working folder so I could carry on working on my tour on my laptop.

I copied my vr tour folder onto the C drive of my laptop C:\My VR Tours\ but when I came to create my flash on my laptop it showed an error "Skin not found Unable to open skin S:/My VR Tours/Windmill - standalone pc/Pano2VR Skin/Windmill (standalone version).ggsk"

So I thought thats a bit odd as I keep all the files (6 tiff cube faces, skin file, p2vr file etc etc) in the same place so I know where everything is which makes backing it up simpler.

I opened the p2vr project file in UltraEdit and notice that there is a line in the project file that has an absolute location to the skin file...

Code: Select all

<skinfile>S:/My VR Tours/Windmill - standalone pc/Pano2VR Skin/Windmill (standalone version).ggsk</skinfile>

This is why I am not able to use the project file on my laptop even though I DO have all the files present together.

So is there any chance you could please alter the software so it references the skin file relative to the project file?
All other file references (source pano image etc) do seem to be relative and not absolute.

As well as making it easy for people to move thier projects around (to any folder on any drive letter) it also means that when you want to make a backup of your project you know that you have backed up everything and its going to work again where ever you decide to place it in the future.

P.S. If you have used one of the predefined skins then you would see this problem as they are always located in C:\Documents and Settings\Andy\Application Data\GardenGnomeSoftware\Skins as specified in the settings panel of Pano2vr. But of course if you have designed your own skin then its more likely that you want it stored in a safe place with all the project data it relates to rather than stored in a complex location on C (in a a place you will forget to backup!)

There is only one way I can sort this problem out at the moment and that is to use the "replace in files" option in UltraEdit to change that particular line in all 27 project files to reflect the new location of my skin on my laptop. Then when I have completed my work on my laptop I will have to repeat the process again before copying the 27 p2vr files back to my S drive again, not an ideal solution

Thanks
Andy

centreofengland · Wed Mar 25, 2009 6:08 pm

If anyone else has this problem with their user created skins then you can use the "replace in files" option in UltraEdit to edit all your p2vr project files to reflect the new location. This is not perfect but it gets around this problem.

To do this use...

Code: Select all

Search for <skinfile>S:/My VR Tours/Windmill - standalone pc/Pano2VR Skin/Windmill (standalone version).ggsk</skinfile>
Replace with 
<skinfile>C:/new path here/Windmill (standalone version).ggsk</skinfile>

Note that the direction of the /

Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:16 am

There is an easy solution. Just put in a "$d" in front of the skin file name so for example "$d/skinfile.ggsk". If you save the skin files in the same directory as your project file the skin files already show up in the skin file drop down list with the $d palace holder.