I develop for MOST USED (recent) version ONLY.
maybe… i’m loosing some users. but this ‘no f*ng pain’ saves me time and money for sure
Well you’ve been at it for a lot longer than I have. In developing for multiple versions, I see an opportunity to learn things that will help me when I inevitably have to develop for the next Max version.
You should certainly check the registry path entries for installed Max versions. This is the standard and everyone should obey to that. If people move install folders arround after installation thats their problem and they will run into trouble with all the loose ini path entries any ways…
Simply loop through all the existing sub entries in [B]HKLM\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\3dsMax[/B] ( x64 versions) and in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Autodesk\3dsMax ( 32bit installs) , which hold the Max install as subkey ( like “9.0” for Max 9, or “19.0” for Max2017 etc )…
and read the “InstallDir” (REG_SZ) value sitting under that key. This should give you the path to the Max install folder.
To check if the installation really still exists, simply check for a “3dsmax.exe” file in that path, and you should be done
Just for completeness: on 32bit windows, there is no Wow6432Node path, but [B]HKLM\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\3dsMax[/B] holds the standard 32bit tree, so you might check wether you are on a 32 bit windows, to decide which version of the plugin to install…
Wait, there’s a way to check registry entries from Maxscript??
I currently have the script set up to automatically check for all the default installation directories it finds, and leave spaces for users to enter any customized paths. Shortly I will get around to letting users save those custom paths.
I’d be interested to see your property sheet file template. I know when I compiled that one-off for Max 2009 I got a few errors and a long list of warnings. The resulting .dlm worked perfectly, but obviously I’d prefer to have a cleaner solution.
And I don’t mind using #if directives. Sure beats having to maintain separate projects for each version of a plugin.
Hm. I know they switched the keyboard shortcut files from .kbd to .kbdx for Max 2013. Just noticed that in Max R5 they used just a .kb extension (though the file structure seems to be identical). I don’t suppose anyone out there knows in what version they changed that one?
EDIT:
Never mind, turns out I had my head on sideways. R5 has both a .kb and a .kbd file in the UI directory, whose default contents look to be the same. Weird!