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Topic: Centralized plugin management

posted by James Coulter / cbvray
archived on 10.1.2003

I typically have plugins setup to be read from one central location on the network for network rendering purposes. And from looking at the manual install directions for the advanced version, it seems that you can not utilize this setup for vray because of the need to have files in the max root directory. Is this true and are there any plans to allow for this type of network setup ?

With all the updates that occur, it would be great if all the plugin files could be copied to one location on the network, rather than max root and plugins directory on each of 50 machines.

Follow-ups

Comment: The way I've set it up at Digital Dimension is that (almost all) plug-ins reside on a network drive.

The way I manage this is that when new versions of VRay are released, I put the .dlr and .dlu files into a new network folder named for that version. I do this because the existing files are likely to be in use and locked by the OS (a drawback of centralizing the plug-ins). And getting everyone to shut down max at the same time pretty much requires a power outage.

So then I need to update all of the plugin.ini files to point to the new VRay folder. For this I wrote a simple command-line utility ( www.jamescoulter.com/resources/jcNetSAR.htm ) that will do a search and replace for a list of text files on the network.

For files that must be local to each machine, I have a network folder that contains a directory structure like that of MAX, but only contains files such as those needed for VRay, company-wide macroscripts, and script libraries, etc. In other words, any files that would be added or changed from a standard max installation go into this structure (except for the plugin.ini file). Then I use a batch file to xcopy these files to each machine on the network.

Lately I've been reconsidering the whether the centralized approach is worth it. The advantage is that if somebody finds a free plug-in on the net, we can just drop it into an existing network folder and everyone simply needs restart max to make use of it. The drawback is that when we need to update a major plug-in, we need to shut down the whole shop to remove the file locks. Having plug-ins on the network also cuases max to load much slower. Besides that, I'm already distributing files to each machine anyway, so it's not a big leap to distribute plug-ins along with it.

In the end, I think Discreet needs to take a look at centralized plug-in management for studios.

Comment: You may already know this but....

You can keep from having to update all the plugin.ini files at each max installation if you use an [include] section in each plugin.ini.

[include]
myremote = \\"your network path"\remote_plugin.ini

This points to an additional remote_plugin.ini file on the network. You can then update the one file on the network, when you need to add a plugin, or path to a new version of the vray plugins.

This also makes it easy to remark out a line in the remote_plugin.ini file with a semi-colon, to keep plugins from loading.

Does anyone know why the files must be in the max root directory? Vlado?

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