I've spent thousands of hours with VAM... but let's face it... This game is impossible to organize...
Around half of .VARs are packaged improperly. They have files in the wrong directories. Many include dupe files instead of linking to the original .VAR files. Many include script files when they should instead be linking to the exact version of the official plugin VAR they used. The dependency system is also broken, you end up with hundreds of VARs you don't actually need because the game will flag random unneeded VARs as dependencies whenever someone builds a VAR. Then it just spirals from there. I had 1 VAR claim it needed ~30 VARs, then those ~30 VARs needed ~100 VARs, then those ~100 VARs needed another ~100 VARs. It never ended. Actually loading the scene and checking for errors, it only needed 6 VARs. The flawed VAR system also results in thousands of duplicates, which after you get around ~2000 VARs VAM begins to slow down signicantly. With 5,000 VARs, I actually run out of RAM with 64GB regularly and it's extremely slow.
The alternative is to just treat VARs as compressed files, extract them using 7zip and manually put them into your VAM install as loose files. This signicantly reduces RAM and CPU usages, and gets rid of 99% of duplicates. But it has a major draw back. Every scene and preset (every .json file) will have file path errors and must be fixed. This is a tedious task that can be done in bulk with Notepad++ and editing .json files directly, but it's a LOT of work. You also manually have to create subfolders for anything with scripts (basically most scenes) otherwise you start overwriting scripts with different versions which causes issues (again, because those VARs were improperly built to begin with). At least, I haven't found a better way to handle loose script files.
Overall, there's no winning. Either you deal with the extremely messy VAR system that gives you no control, or you go loose files and deal with having to fix file paths on everything you download and have. Which can take days of work if you have lots of content.
I really hope VAM 2.0 is better.
Around half of .VARs are packaged improperly. They have files in the wrong directories. Many include dupe files instead of linking to the original .VAR files. Many include script files when they should instead be linking to the exact version of the official plugin VAR they used. The dependency system is also broken, you end up with hundreds of VARs you don't actually need because the game will flag random unneeded VARs as dependencies whenever someone builds a VAR. Then it just spirals from there. I had 1 VAR claim it needed ~30 VARs, then those ~30 VARs needed ~100 VARs, then those ~100 VARs needed another ~100 VARs. It never ended. Actually loading the scene and checking for errors, it only needed 6 VARs. The flawed VAR system also results in thousands of duplicates, which after you get around ~2000 VARs VAM begins to slow down signicantly. With 5,000 VARs, I actually run out of RAM with 64GB regularly and it's extremely slow.
The alternative is to just treat VARs as compressed files, extract them using 7zip and manually put them into your VAM install as loose files. This signicantly reduces RAM and CPU usages, and gets rid of 99% of duplicates. But it has a major draw back. Every scene and preset (every .json file) will have file path errors and must be fixed. This is a tedious task that can be done in bulk with Notepad++ and editing .json files directly, but it's a LOT of work. You also manually have to create subfolders for anything with scripts (basically most scenes) otherwise you start overwriting scripts with different versions which causes issues (again, because those VARs were improperly built to begin with). At least, I haven't found a better way to handle loose script files.
Overall, there's no winning. Either you deal with the extremely messy VAR system that gives you no control, or you go loose files and deal with having to fix file paths on everything you download and have. Which can take days of work if you have lots of content.
I really hope VAM 2.0 is better.
You do nothing with them. They are only there so you can preview what's included in a VAR. You aren't suppose to just install all VARs off that torrent, it'll make your game incredibly slow and unstable.
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