We currently have a slave scheduling system, where the artist can choose to “stay another hour”, by clicking a ‘delay’ button, or even “skip tonight” by clicking another.
Also, sometimes artists decide to run the slave app all day, while working (or they are out of office).
So it would be nice to allow some overrides of the currently rigid ON/OFF periods defined in the power management dialog. If an artist decides to help out, by adding his machine to the farm, it turns back off after a single rendered task, as the scheduler detects that “it should be off right now”.
Or if you are working late, you have no way to make the slave leave you alone for an hour or so, as it will relaunch every 5 minutes as the scheduler detects that the slave is not running.
Thats fine, we already have a python based system for this, so we will just hook that up to starting the deadline slave for now till the ‘official’ feature arrives,
To piggy-back on this thread, it would be great if Deadline had a built-in system for changing pool priorities on a schedule for a slave group or arbitrary list of slaves.
A great sample interface for this is uTorrent’s scheduler GUI. I’m basically imagining a similar grid interface that would allow you to select time blocks, either individually or in groups, and apply pool sorting overrides to slave groups or lists. It could also potentially be used to move slaves into or out of groups on a schedule.
Obviously this isn’t going to be a 6.0 feature, but since it’s something we’re going to have to implement ourselves right out of the gate, I figured it was worth a request.