How come this feature was removed from Deadline 6? Can’t find anything about it in the docs.
It would be better if instead of a screensaver slave launch, you could implement an idle after x minutes slave launch. The difference is that a sim could be running or whatever and the screensaver would still kick in and start the slave, but checking how long the computer has been idle would only start the slave if the computer hasn’t been doing anything for a set time period.
Hello,
This feature was removed because there were changes in several of the more modern operating systems that prevented it from working right. I will definitely pass along that idea for an alternative, if we can get that in for a future build. Thanks!
Thanks for the reply and for logging the wish! I have software that detects how long my machine is idle and I’m pretty sure it’s easy to check on Linux too but don’t know about Macs. It would be great to have this again because lots of people forget to launch their slaves when they leave work (perhaps if they are in a rush, or if they are just forgetful). On my two home machines it’s no big deal but at work it makes a big difference.
If people are just forgetting to launch before they leave work, you could use scheduled slaves to accomplish the same thing. If you set it to startup at like 10pm, hopefully most of your artists are home and the few sticking around can just manually kill it if it pops up.
Yeah, specifically on Windows Vista and up, the Screensaver runs in a protected account which does not have access to network folders. That means no access to the Repository, and that’s not going to go well for the Slave.
There are a few third party ways of achieving the ‘run on idle’ goal. Windows has scheduled tasks, but the ‘run on idle’ means the CPU is idle, not the mouse and keyboard.
A user showed me something he made for OS X that seems promising. I haven’t tried it yet, so use at your own risk, but it can be found over here:
n3d.org/?p=16
While this kind of works, it’s not really ideal. Some people get in early and leave early, then others consistently work late. You loose a lot of hours of rendering. I appreciate the tip but the “idle” option would be ideal.
I’ll try a third party program for Windows and see how well that works but I am 99% sure that you can check both CPU use and mouse and keyboard use and it would be great if you could implement this into Deadline. I’ve not been at a studio where people launching their slaves hasn’t been an issue. You also loose of a lot of possible processing time during lunch, and people take lunch at slightly different times and sometimes not at all so scheduling slaves doesn’t work in that scenario very well either.
I’m just adding it as a wish list item, the screensaver did a fairly good job (except of course when you’d run local sims) but an “idle” solution would be fantastic.
We currently have a wishlist item where slave scheduling could be handled by the launcher running on the machine. It would allow for the same level of control currently offered in Power Management, but then we could add other scheduling options like idle launching.
It’s not on an official roadmap yet, but it’s something we would definitely like to add in the future.
Cheers,
Ryan