 | | | addon questions | addon questions 2005-05-11 - By Haarm-Pieter Duiker
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Hello,
I've put together a couple of addons. Doing so has brought up a couple of
questions. The questions come mostly from the fact that there is much waving of
the hands and praying to the gods when it comes to getting a .addon file
created, installed, and useable. There are a number of issues that are too
unclear for me to be comfortable with.
A reference to documentation or a general explanation of how addons work
internally would be much appreciated. The XSI SDK documentation doesn't really
go into the depth I'm looking for.
The questions the process has brought up are :
1. Is it possible to make a self contained .addon?
So far, I've had to install my shaders in my user area, create the .addon to
package up a group of shaders. It has seemed necessary to install the addon
into the workgroup area before removing individual shaders installed in my user
area. I'm pretty sure the .dll isn't part of the .addon.
2. Relating to #1, What information is contained in the .addon?
They seem to be bigger than combined size of the .spdls that they should
reference, but not bigger than the .spdls and the .dll, or the .spdls and the
.Preset files.
3. When I install an addon that contains many different .spdls that all
reference the same .dll, the shader_plugins.mi file is updated to reference the
new .spdl declarations, but only the first of those declartations contains a
link statement for the .dll. The rest have a spdl statement but no link
statement. Is this a known bug?
4. Is there a process for updating .addon package installations without forcing
everyone to quit out of XSI?
The .spdl and .Preset files seem to be read and released at startup time. The
.dll files on the other hand are opened continuously while XSI is running. This
seems to be true only after the first render, but assuming that your shader is
being used a fair bit within a facility, the chances of your .dll not being in
use are slim.
.dlls being used to render with standalone ray can be renamed without breaking
a render. This allows developers to install a .dll in the place of the old
without breaking currently running renders. The way XSI locks file access to
the .dlls precludes this little trick. Are there known ways to update a .addon
package workgroup installation in place?
The .addon packages that we're using right now are being referenced by up to
60 machines at a time so it's not very convenient to have to force everyone to
either quit XSI or stop rendering before we want to install a new version of
the addon.
Thanks in advance for reading this far and even more so for responding,
Haarm-Pieter Duiker
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