i’m wondering if there’s any chance to ‘properly’ install XMesh silently.
We’re using using a system to deploy a lot of software which demands silent installers as it runs the installers before logon.
I’m using the following command to initiate the installation:
While working on the implementation i noticed a few things:
when the installer does not find any 3ds Max installation it will pop up a window (see attached screenshot) with the error message
3ds Max plugin installation for XMeshSaver-MX
Error installing to :
Could not determine the version of the specified 3ds Max installation
To my understanding this should not happen when using the option ‘/qn’.
despite the above error message the installation finishes. When using
echo %errorlevel%
right after the installation finished it returns ‘0’. Shouldn’t this be rather some other value to indicate that there was an issue during installation?
Right now, i’m running a check for the installation directory of 3ds Max as a condition for running the XMesh installation. So the error message should not really show up and give any trouble. But as this behaviour hasn’t shown up with e.g. the KrakatoaMX installer i’m guessing this is a bug.
the lack of a combined installer for both the XMeshSaver and XMeshLoader.
Is there anything like this being planned or coming up soon? It’s not an urgent need but would streamline the whole process a bit more.
Thank you for mentioning this! I will log this as a bug.
Yes, although I feel this shouldn’t be an error in the first place.
It’s possible, but no, as far as I know, we are not planning to change this. There are good arguments for either arrangement, and in fact we chose a combined installer for XMesh MY. Some arguments in favour of separate installers are that they make it easier for us to freely distribute the loader, and they allow users to update the loader and saver independently.
Agreed. So it probably shouldn’t return ‘1’ either but some other code.
I totally understand the reason and need to be able to distribute the Saver and Loader separately. But would it maybe be possible to provide all 3 variations (Saver, Loader and a combined one)?
i just found another issue probably related to the silent install. We have a few render slaves that have more than one version of 3ds Max installed. It seems that XMesh is only added to the most recent version of 3ds Max on those machines. On the machines where e.g. Max 2012 and Max 2014 are installed it only added XMesh (both Loader and Saver) to the plugin.ini of Max 2014 but not 2012. Is there any commandline way of doing the “Add XMesh to 3ds Max” without the need to do this manually? Right now, this is breaking our software deployment mechanism. I think it’s even better if the installer took care of this and installs it for all available Max versions.
thanks for the instructions - good to know! That’ll definitely do it for now. Am i right to assume that a procedure like this with MaxPluginHelper.exe also exists for all the other Thinkbox products?
Also thanks for logging the feature request.
