So here's a little bit of ranting for the nubes and rubes just getting to this 'game'.
The original game was developed by Thrixxx, with a focus on Jenna Jameson, with their Virtually Jenna product. It was later redone in different "Flavors" as 3dSexvilla and 3dHentaiVilla. Both had similar build structures and capabilities, and could share several pieces of code that built objects, models, code, etc. Soon after, they added more customization options with the respective 'games' and put on 2 at the end of the name. Almost immediately following, some of the entusiasts realized that the games shared much of the same executable code built on UNITY and microsoft's Directx libraries that were OPENGL compatible. Because they shared so much code, several in the user community simply combined the two game folders, and ended up with one game folder, one set of models, etc. Then they realized that all the items, rooms, models etc were interchangeable in the games, though there were a few shaders that differed.
It was after this last part that The game was "Cracked" by pirating, and later, this Cracking provided more insight into the executables and how they worked. Eventually, it was reverse engineered almost all the way back to source, since the executable was just the main loader that built only the outermost running process. After this was exposed, users began building modding communities like this one for this game, many of which were sued and lost, having utilized a cracked EXE to pass out free copies of the original code. Eventually, some were settled by rebuilding the code with newer code that did the same thing, but utilized more efficient and higher quality graphics. That was Modsgarden. They were great at pushing the tech forward. Now it has once again gone commercial.
Here are some tips ok?
1. Keep this off of your main drive. It takes up a load of space the more you customize it, and it also utilizes free space on it's install location to store temporary copies of uncompressed graphics. Having this app and it's folders external of your main system is a protection against losing both.
2. Keep an excel file of your custom models, complete with model number, clone\original, name and some other specifics. This can make moving them into and out of the save folder easy, so you can speed up load times. Do the same for rooms.
3. Use a symlink creation program to link the temporary files folders to very fast SSD or empty thumbdrives. They will get used to the fullest, and you will get faster loading times, even with more content.
4. If you use HOOK files, keep a copy of them on a flash drive. Also, keep copies of a whole body pass file. You can use this to create new pass files for different body parts to make new bodies and adjustments inside hook5 easily. I'm working on a way to build these files in such a way that you only need to select the file you are attaching to the pass file, and it will build a file for that body part using the path from the file you choose. It would remove the need to adjust the text by hand every time. Even better, it would allow you to make multiple copies of a functional Pass file so you could adjust the color, etc for different body shades.
5. If you don't have a graphics card that will record your screen, you should probably get a program to do this that you can activate with a keypress. USing NVidia cards gets you access to their gforce experience apps, which run in the background, and allow you to record the screen in high resolution with smooth motion. Some people use hardware gaming rigs that say they record the screen input, but they will drop frames that are 'dupelicated', which means they only put a special mark in the file that says a frame used to be there and many players will simply double the frame from before, but most prosumer (ie not basics built; heavily accelerated graphics quality) editing software will bawk at missing frames, as they require the frame to exist. Many of these softwares do have separate "encoders" that will fix the problem with a single pass through the encoder, in minimal time, giving you a useable version of the file. Nvidia also shows signs of this problem, but like I said, run it through an algorithm that will "recreate" the frame.
6. If you have problems loading, take some stuff out. I installed this twice. Once on a flash drive, once to an internal ssd, in that order. Anytime I need to, I can move files around from one to the other and experiment on how and where they need to go to show up in the game. However, I have also used symlinks in both sets to point at locations that have fast storage for loading different pieces and parts from different locations. If you have a lot of models or a very large save folder, you may want to try this. A USB flash drive can easily be archived to DVD with the right programs, giving you a viable backup. My way? I use an app like Acronis backup, image the drive and use the incremental features to maintain a set of backups that get written to dvd when there are changes.
For those of you with Direct X 8 problems:
This game was originally built for directx 8 compatibility. When it hit its second version, it was rebuilt to run on unity, but it still utilized directx 9 which was semicompatible with opengl and allowed the game to run on lesser quality systems.
Windows has long had a history of problems with games being outmoded when their linkage to directx files became detached. To combat this problem, they built in the ability to load the library from the program itself. When calling for this file in a header include, it searches first in the game folder where the exe runs. After that, it searches the system folders where this file is found. IF the includes are too specific about which version to use, and the filename to access, the game will break. However, if the filename exists, even if that file is simply a copy of another newer version of the library, the game will run. It is usually faster to put a copy of such a file in the game folder next to the exe, as the system doesn't keep such things registered. That way the game will load it quickly and will function normally. Hook files come with their own copy of this file, which should match one on your system for size and simply be a copy of it; Hook makes use of some new interface elements in the code that allow for making adjustments while the code is running, simply by reloading the main graphics window that's on top of your screen output. I suggest you read up on hook5, hook4, and hook3, then pick one that fits your system; they allow you to get realism out of this game that you wouldn't have otherwise.
For out of memory errors:
There was an update made to this game that allowed it to make use of 2 sets of memory registers, maxing out it's ram use at 4gb. If you run this game on a system with more than 8gb of ram, you should patch the exe with this update. While it has little effect on available graphics memory, it has an enormous effect on the number of open files you can run. The more adjustments you run, the more memory you will need to store the file pointers.
If, for any reason, you find yourself constantly overpowering this app, remember that there are other apps out there. Right now Virt-a-Mate is the closest relative to this app and will run with 64bit memory registers. It is a VR based game, rather than an screen-interface based game, but it does have a screen-based variant that you can run.
What I miss:
In the early games, there was the possibility of 2 cursors. You could use them as hands or for different operations. This has become moot as of late. Some games now offer the use of hands as an option, or vr controllers that perform the operations like hands, but there aren't so many options for 2d systems. Xbox and gamecube controlers both have two analogue sticks and could probably be used this way, but it would take some programming... I still miss it though.