It would be really nice if Thinkbox released a plugin-server/Portal/Store where you could host a single plugin manager that was deadline compatible on your file server. It would automatically connect to the thinkbox servers and download the latest executables from your web servers. It would connect to the FlexLM license server and identify what products you can download. If you wanted a trial it would also provide a simple interface to like click “+ Trial” and send you guys a trial request.
Then on all of our render slaves we could just install the “Thinkbox Plugin manager” and it would deploy all of your products like xMesh loader as needed. It could even deploy Deadline. And deadline would be smart enough to say “I need xMesh MX 2.0 as a dependency” and deploy that specific build to the slave prior to rendering.
If the system worked well you could also probably pretty easily convince ChaosGroup to also add support for customers to add Vray Packages to the deployment system.
I’m imagining a system where there would be like a python plugin for each package describing how to deploy it (modify plugin.ini etc) along with like an XML and then a zip of the actual data dump.
This way we wouldn’t have to harass your sales team every other month for a download link for each product. We wouldn’t have instances of one machine being on a different version of xMesh and borking something. You could deploy beta products to customers more smoothly.
It could also operate as the usage based server and you could sell usage based licenses through this one application as well.