What needs to be done with the Plugin?

[Nye_Sigismund]

Whilst the GoW are doing great work with the client, nobody is working on the 3ds Max plugin.

I'm considering making a few posts on a few forums, seeing if any extra-Uru 3DS Max developers would be interested in getting on board both getting the plugin into a buildable state, as well as porting it to Max 9+ (ideally to 2009 onwards).

So here's an open question - what needs to be done to get the plugin building properly? And what needs to be done to get it ported?

[rarified]

First impression and shooting from the hip: We need the SDK, which if I understand correctly is only available bundled with 3ds Max distribution media. I don't have a copy of Max for the foundry, so I can't do much in terms of a general offering right now.

Maybe they have a discounted offering for non-profit or open source organizations, but I havn't investigated.

_R

[Nye_Sigismund]

Is any of this any help?

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/in ... d=13379697

[rarified]

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it.... There's a connector between Visual Studio and an already installed SDK, but none of those items actually contains the SDK we need. Thanks for looking though.

_R

[Chisaipete]

I have a full (legitimate) commercial license of the newest 3ds MAX 2012 + SDK installed on my machine. I believe I'd be happy to take on this project, but i'll need to fully realize it's scale this evening.

[Nye_Sigismund]

I have a full (legitimate) commercial license of the newest 3ds MAX 2012 + SDK installed on my machine. I believe I'd be happy to take on this project, but i'll need to fully realize it's scale this evening.

Great news! But will the 2012 SDK work with this plugin's source code?

[Chisaipete]

I'm guessing NO, but I'll delve into it when I get a chance later today and try and give some more substantial answers. I'm going to download the code and breeze through it at lunch (12:30 PST) I'm at work.

EDIT: Some thoughts

I seem to remember that with 3DS Max 2009 there were some pretty major back-end overhauls of the whole 3ds Max System. To what extent plugins were affected probably depends on which depreciated functions and methods Cyan was using.

[Nye_Sigismund]

Good to hear. I might have found an older SDK - Max 8, in fact - but I need to check it first.

[Mac_Fife]

My understanding is that Max 7 and Max 8 APIs were reasonably similar to the extent that the Max 7 based Plugin would work OK with Max 8. Like Chisaipete, I think there was a major overhaul in Max 9 that broke that compatibility and almost certainly means that the SDK wrapping will need to be revisited. Hopefully, it doesn't imply a wholescale rewrite and a bit of judicious tweaking of function calls will suffice, but in the absence of an up-to-date SDK myself, I'm just hoping .

It'd be good if we could get the plugin built for as may different versions of Max as possible: 3ds Max is a pricey piece of software so allowing folks to use what they can easiliy get hold of rather than pinning them to one or two specific versions will be a big help.

[Nye_Sigismund]

Ideally, and this might well be really, really hard, is a plugin that works in newer versions of Max that can save into a format that the current Max 7 plugin can read. Can modern .max files even be opened by old Max versions? Hmm. :\