I revisited recently a dormant project of mine, for which I unfortunately need to write a 3dsmax exporter plugin.
Now, I’m always pissed off from the start when I have to write code on windows and visual studio, but having to deal with 3dsmax on top of that, really just adds insult to injury. It’s not just that maxsdk is a convoluted mess. Or that it needs a very specific version of visual studio to write plugins for it (which is really Microsoft’s fault, to be fair). No, my biggest issue so far is that 3dsmax takes about 3 years to start up, and there is no way to unload, or reload a plugin without restarting it.
Whenever I fix a tiny thing in the exporter plugin I’m writting, and I want to try it out and see if it does the buissiness, I have to shut down 3dsmax, start it up again (which takes forever), load my test scene, then try to export again and see what happens. This is obviously unacceptable, so I really had to do something about it.
Code Laboratorium 