“I would love if we could have custom views in the next deadline. Ideally some sort of python plugin to create our custom view.
Id like to create custom views to display live flowline simulation data. It would need to be able to update itself via a timer or something.
If a custom python module is not possible then maybe we could make it work via some sort of built in website renderer.”
This would be great, and would make some of our previous requests (like an image viewer panel) redundant as well, as we could simply implement it ourselves easily.
That’s definitely on our radar, but I don’t think it will make it into 8.0… This could be a good 8.1 feature though, since it shouldn’t really require breaking any existing functionality and shouldn’t require too much additional framework from us aside from adding a new folder to the repo for those scripts to live in.
You could theoretically do a lot of this now, with just General monitor scripts, it just wouldn’t hook into all the layout stuff that we have currently (which is part of the legwork that we’d have to do, obviously).
I guess while I have your ear on the topic, what would you be looking for in terms of custom panel integration? What I’m envisioning would be basically a python script that returns an instance of a QWidget (or more likely a deadline-specific subclass of QWidget). The Monitor would then pull these scripts, and populate the Panel menu with any that are present, similar to how we handle all our other scripted Monitor stuff. Docking and layout saving/loading should all be handled magically by Deadline, basically same as we do for our own panels.
I don’t think we’d have to worry about setting up a timer event or anything, because that could easily be taken care of within your widget itself by using a QTimer. It would also obviously have access to our embedded Python API (Deadline.Scripting.*, etc), but definitely let us know if you don’t think that would cover everything you need!
Yeah i think what you describe would be ideal, basically implementing our own QWidget with access to all the qt & deadline.scripting.* goodness.
Also, it would be essential to have some sort of event hook mechanism, so that we could trigger updates via delegate functions if say, the user changes jobs / tasks etc in other panels (instead of relying on a timer).