SDK and Scripting Enhancements

PURPOSE
Please help us collect ideas for SDK and scripting-related enhancements.

What’s on your top ten list? Add a vote to any idea you also think is important!

HOW TO USE THE FORUM

  • Each user has 20 votes for each forum
  • Each idea can have no more than 3 votes by a single user
  • If you enter an idea, it will cost you 1 vote – therefore try to make sure the idea doesn’t already exist
  • The more precise and detailed a description you give, the more likely your idea will rise higher in the list
  • When an idea is implemented, votes are returned to all the users that voted
  • User can change their votes at any time
  • Admins can move, edit and delete ideas as they see fit to better meet the goals of the forum
  • We will flag ideas that are getting our attention as “under review”. Because of limits on what we can say publicly, that is as far as we can go with commenting on a particular idea. If it is “under review” it simply means we’re studying it for possible implementation or gathering data, but there is no commitment to do it.

Remember, we do not release versions on “internet time”. Unlike the web sites this was designed for, our process of releasing functionality is much longer term. So there won’t be a constant churn of ideas being “closed out” by us and votes returned to you. For this tool to map to our process, we will be looking at the data during a short period of the year (3-6 months) and deciding what actions to take after that. Don’t expect to post an idea and a month later for us to respond in some fashion to it. The most likely scenario is that you’ll post an idea and if a lot of other people vote on it, we’ll eventually flag it as “under review” – but that could be 9 months later or longer.

Please treat this as an experiment in working with the community. Even if Uservoice is not the final home for this, we’ll do our best to export all the ideas to whatever future system might take its place. Your voice will persist.

Note: It’s important to realize that these lists are simply raising the quality of the feedback we get from the community. They are not a replacement for how we define the features for any given release. They are valuable input, but beta input, product strategy, focus, innovation and other factors are also important aspects we consider.

AVAILABLE PUBLIC FORUMS
Default Settings
Please tell us which user defaults settings you change the most! Enter a description of the default or ini setting and then see how the community votes on it. Remember these are only the user preferences you can either set in the interface or ini files.

General Feature Requests
Please help us collect ideas for new features and general product enhancements. What’s on your top ten list? Add a vote to any idea you also think is important!

Small Annoying Things
This forum is about all the little annoying quirks and problems in 3ds Max that you might have gotten used to over the years but that really should be fixed.
Remember, keep these ideas to tweaks of the workflow rather than large, sweeping changes to the tools. Try to imagine how much effort a programmer has to go into in order to implement your suggestion. Anything requiring major UI changes or new UI dialogs will need to go in another forum.

SDK/Scripting Enhancements
This forum is about improvements to the SDK or Script-related.

How might the Autodesk 3ds Max SDK/Scripting be improved?

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  • Hot ideas
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  1. Update the sample code

    Some of the sample plugin code is pretty much unchanged since Max 2 or 3. A good example is the particle code. I really can't imagine that the actual code used in Max is the same as the sample code in the SDK (and if it is, why hasn't it been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century?)

    40 votes
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    0 comments  ·  SDK documentation  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  2. More comments in the example code

    Right now, the samples included in the SDK have almost zero comments. This really should be improved to allow beginners to follow the code better.

    30 votes
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    0 comments  ·  SDK documentation  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  3. Complete C++ documentation with more examples per function (in documentations)

    Complete C++ documentation with more examples per function (in documentations).
    There are many non documented areas in the SDK documentation.
    I almost spent 3 months to find a simple function that was not documented.

    19 votes
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  4. Make sample code that actually compiles without errors

    Every class should have a sample that compiles without errors. I'm still trying to make my first helper, but I'm stuck on the error message “cannot instantiate abstract class”.

    16 votes
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  5. Add more mental ray samples

    The mental ray samples that come with the SDK aren't exactly useful. It would be great to have some actual shaders as reference, or even a few of the max shaders like Noise or Checker. I'm sure a lot of the people out there that write free plugins for Max would be more willing to do mental ray versions if they didn't have to spend a huge amount of time trying to find all the information they need on the internet. Mental ray is now pretty much the standard renderer in Max, so start treating it as such in the…

    12 votes
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SDK and Scripting Enhancements

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