I’ve just migrate my studio from 5 to 6.5 recently.
It’s a nice upgrade, the interface is really more reactive and that’s a pleasure to work with, but i’ve got few question or changes that annoy me.
#1 Remote Desktop Control
While i’ve got more than 150+ slave, i used to work a lot with deadline to manage my workstations & renderfarms.
In production, my main job is to maintain slave out of error & to control what is calculating seems to be good (i can stop job if it seems bad, to save render times).
So i need a lot a remote control (with windows RDP) to navigate fast between rendernodes.
Deadline 5 was really powerful to that with the Remoting Software options & the possibilities to save settings of RDC in a folder and off course the immediate shortcut ctrl+R to remote desktop my selected machines.
Why the hell all of this options disappeared in version 6.2 ?! (i’m debuging 3dsmax 2015 too… is it fashion to delete usefull commands & to implements useless ones ?)
Remote Desktop seem to be replaced by connect to slave Log (witch is so useless while rendering…) and now hided under scripting sub menu.
I’ve try to assign a shortcut to the script, but it’s divide into 4 or 5 categories… so painful.
And finally when i get my easy remote shortcut… i’ve got a so useless popup “Choose machines to Connect with RDC” that i can’t avoid, and Deadline can’t save my settings… so sad.
I ain’t find any people complaining about it, while it is so painful to me, so maybe i misc something ?
#2 Icons versions
It is not a blocking problem, but when comes times to deploy over 100+ nodes a newer version of deadline, it would be appreciable to have a little different icons to have a quick look at what’s you’r doing.
I guest i’m supposed to uninstall older version, but there’s always a little time of transition were i got both versions on machines.
#3 UI modification
A great job was done on UI, with removable panel. It’s really fine.
But i ain’t find any option to change that horrible Minitel theme (no offense )
Please allow us to change background colors or, a least, a dark & light theme (like 3dsmax)
That’s all for the moment !
I know that Deadline version 7 is coming (with winter) and i hope i’ll get feedback before release.
One more time, it’s a nice release, a great job, but i don’t understand why some powerful options are squeeze like that.
Thanks for reading !
Or main reason for changing this was to pull out all of the weird custom code for external programs. Our goal with 6.0 was to simplify all the weird cruft we’d accumulated (Growl support?!) over the years that we could solve with scripting.
Now we can support a brand new remote desktop client program without ever having to rebuild the core Deadline code! Considering we only release a new build of Deadline every six monthsish makes this super handy for those clients doing something unexpected, or for people who don’t like how it works!
Now that I know what your problems are, we can work together to make it work better. The good news is that the popup you don’t like can be hidden by checking the “Hide this window if running from a right-click Scripts menu” checkbox.
For the rest of them, can you open a ticket at support@thinkboxsoftware.com so we can get a few more features you need implemented there? I didn’t use RDP very much back in the 5.x days, so you’ll need to help me out here.
Icons
Oh yeah, we totally hit this one too. The good news is that in Deadline 7, we’re numbering the program names. The bad news is that the icons are the same. Well, I like the icons, but it’s a bit harder to pick them out at a glance.
UI Mods
Fixed in 7!
You’ll be able to change the colours of the list items as well as the master colour. We played around with CSS so you could change literally EVERYTHING, and we ended up hitting limitations in Qt if I remember correctly. There’s the other problem of having just way too many options to tweak. I’ll attach a screenshot showing that off.
Feel free to send more of these. Discussions like this are pretty much how we improve and add stuff (aside from our own internal crazy ideas), so they’re super healthy.
I had access to beta 7, so i saw the changed on UI & icons ! it’s really getting good !
I understand for changing remote to a script.
I changed my shortcuts to fast remote but the option “hide this windows” works only with right click & not with scripts (this is fixed in deadline 7 btw)
Maybe this oculd be fix in 6.2 too.
Has there been any update to this? I also manage 150 machines and constantly use RDP to remote into them. Every single time I have to at the very least type in the render account password and, if it’s a machine I haven’t been in to recently (or a workstation that someone uses during the day), I have to also type the user account. Is there any way to send the user/pass along to the command that calls RDP? I’ve been looking at the python scripts but so far can’t see where that might be included, but I’ve got to believe it’s possible.
I was able to add a keyboard shortcut easily to the command, but would love for it to simply go straight to the machine when I do, rather than prompt for user/pass.
I’ve setup my own bunch of script for remote control : just a hack of existing ConnectWithRemoteDesktop.py remapped to a home made folder with all my .RDP files.
All binded to a CTRL+R shortcut.
It make the job like i used to deadline 5.2.
)
