Zmodeler behaving weird

[DhruvS]

Hi,

I'm currently on a trial period. Last night when I checked, my Zmod was showing I have 3 days left. Today, I tried opening it and it started doing antics- it started with the software telling me my password is wrong; I hadn't changed anything, it had been the same since I first logged in and started working. I tried to type in the exact same one that I log in with here, it didn't work. So I removed it as it's optional. In the website, however, it's showing me I've got 0 days ~5 hours remaining:


If this was indeed true, Zmodeler reporting 3 days remaining was misleading information. I would have tried to export my car even if it didn't have some of the equipment I wanted to put in it. Anyway, if it was working even now and I had 5 hours, I won't mind but it doesn't even work anymore. The license window just keeps flip-flopping between "Verification: Checking online..." and then this:



It was incredibly difficult to even take the above screenshot because it appears for a fraction of a second before it goes back to "Verification: Checking online...". I have been dealing with this for hours.

Its incredibly frustrating to have been told that I have at least 2-3 days remaining and then a few hours later, the system changing its story and not even letting you open the software to rescue your work. This feels like its keeping hours of my efforts hostage despite promising me I have anywhere between 5 hours to 2-3 days remaining on my license. Please at least allow me to salvage my project that I had been working hard on. I was this close to finishing my first ever project.

[Oleg]

Hello.
You have activated your license on November 28th. It has expired today, it is a correct time frame for 15-days license to expire.
You might have seen the lowest row in "License Information" window that has license verification time shown. Trial license is validated for 3 days and requires new validation every 3 days. So, it might have been a "Verification: revalidate in 3 days" label that you might have confused with license time left.

Also, license time shown in license server is more accurate than the one you see on your computer. There might be incorrect date/time set on your computer that might confuse ZModeler, that is why an online connection to license server is a must for ZModeler to run. Yet it can give you some days in offline and might show wrong license validity while this period elapses.

Due to specific of license key coding, it is not possible to install license key that has less than one day left on it, the key have to be installed at least one day before expiration. Pre-installed license key works up to expiration fine, it can be validated on the last day of validity too.

P.S. even if your license has expired/not validated/not installed, ZModeler allows you to save your scene as .z3d file, so you don't loose any of your work in progress. Yes, you will be unable to Open/Import/Export or Merge, but Save/Save As are always available.

[DhruvS]

Hello.
You have activated your license on November 28th. It has expired today, it is a correct time frame for 15-days license to expire.
You might have seen the lowest row in "License Information" window that has license verification time shown. Trial license is validated for 3 days and requires new validation every 3 days. So, it might have been a "Verification: revalidate in 3 days" label that you might have confused with license time left.

Also, license time shown in license server is more accurate than the one you see on your computer. There might be incorrect date/time set on your computer that might confuse ZModeler, that is why an online connection to license server is a must for ZModeler to run. Yet it can give you some days in offline and might show wrong license validity while this period elapses.

Due to specific of license key coding, it is not possible to install license key that has less than one day left on it, the key have to be installed at least one day before expiration. Pre-installed license key works up to expiration fine, it can be validated on the last day of validity too.

P.S. even if your license has expired/not validated/not installed, ZModeler allows you to save your scene as .z3d file, so you don't loose any of your work in progress. Yes, you will be unable to Open/Import/Export or Merge, but Save/Save As are always available.

Hi Oleg,

It did not expire today. I'm in North American EST timezone; for me it expired over 24 hours ago. Like I explained in the post, it was behaving oddly, flip-flopping between verifying online and the other window whose screenshot I posted, and did not allow me to open my file at any point. Every time I tried to press "Ok" or "Accept" despite its antics, it would always result in "Could not open file", which is obvious, because the current model mandatorily requires online verification of the license before it will allow opening of the file. Because of this, if what you're saying is true and the license did indeed expire today and not yesterday, the entire day of yesterday was wasted and now my license is gone anyway. As of last night, it doesn't flip-flops but just straight up denies opening the file and my online account says that I don't even have 5 hours left on my license, that I had when I took that screenshot in the original post.

As for trial license revalidating in 3 days, I never saw that; right from the beginning it gave me 17 days. I didn't think much of it at the time because I supposed it's holiday season and there must be 2 extra days of trial or whatever but I intended to finish my project on the 15th day, just to be on the safe side, however as you know, I couldn't because Zmodeler didn't let me, and my entire day yesterday was spent fixing numerous issues only for them to get fixed right when my license was cancelled. It was indeed misleading for it to say "17 days remaining" the day I activated the license.

The time and date on my computer is correct to my timezone, but Zmodeler has never revealed to me that it works off of a different timezone so I'd say that should be in the program as a heads up.

And there's the problem- you say that even if the license has expired, I can still continue to work and save the .z3d file but as already mentioned, Zmodeler has been denying me to open my project BEFORE the trial license was up so it does not matter because now it definitely won't let me open it, let alone save or export it so all that progress is as good as lost anyways. I implore you to help me out here.

[Oleg]

My bad, there is a scenario for the above to be true, and it's exactly as you describe it. If you activate 15-days trial license and upon installation (or after activation in web account) it appears to have more than 15 days, the license will still expire and get blocked after 15 days. This is a limitation of license key itself (text version of the key), sometimes it's impossible to generate license key for a specific platform ID on a specific date with a specific days count on the key, as license key have to conform a set of check-sum formulas. To make a valid key, license server can add 2-3 days to license period on the key to make it match the verification-check formulas (so ZModeler can accept it). Given that, you can see more than 15 days upon installation in ZModeler that could confuse or give wrong information to the user. This happens on trial, 30-days and (rarely) on 60 days, this is not a case with longer term licenses.

ZModeler can not work with expired license in any manner. As you mention, I specified that "...can still continue to work and save the .z3d file". That's exactly one and the only available file operation you can do when no license installed or upon expiration of installed license. Just in case you have ZModeler running for a long time and you reach the date of license expiration, you can still Save the scene to avoid loss of your work (and ZModeler will show a message about license validity to let you know about this issue). Of course, ZModeler will not not let you Open/Merge anything or Import/Export anything with expired license.

Given that we are talking about your issue with free trial license, I can not offer you any options other than adding extra 3 days to the paid license you purchase (if you would like to purchase a paid license).

[DhruvS]

Yeah, like I said I was really concerned because it always showed me +2 days on top of my 15 so I always assumed there might be a promo or something going on for the holidays.

I was already unsure about whether to purchase the paid license later because of this constant issue on my machine: viewtopic.php?t=15014

And yes, I have tried downloading Rude Window fixer (all three versions of it) and neither of them actually solves the problem, making it so it's extremely frustrating to work with Zmod as it is. Everytime I finish working on the project I had to essentially restart my entire machine so I can do other things properly as they're meant to be. But between the trial ending prematurely (after 14 days) and the added misleading 2 days on top of that, I don't know whether I'd be willing to pay 10 dollars just to be able to export a singular car. It feels unethical to me for the software to hold my project hostage on the 14th day after promising me 17 days.

[brainiac]

I guess this is right topic to compain.
When I try to file/merge ATS prefabs from another or even same file, result is pertty much nothing.
My license is valid and active (I can import and export).

[Oleg]

I guess this is right topic to compain.
When I try to file/merge ATS prefabs from another or even same file, result is pertty much nothing.
My license is valid and active (I can import and export).

File\Merge is about .z3d files. So the file you are trying to merge have to be saved as .z3d file first.
The behavior of Merge depends on collisions - you can adjust it on Settings\General\Files branch.

[brainiac]

If soemone else ever have same problem: Set merge collisions to autoresolve.