Happy Spring to everyone! This week our ADN DevTech M&E team are together in Montreal as a newly formed group. I would like to apologize for the lack of activity here, but the good news is that we are back to being fully staffed, and should be able to start blogging more frequently again!
The even better news, of course, is the announcement of the new 3ds Max 2016 version. For a full overview of the features, please see the posting here: Introducing 3ds Max 2016. Please take a moment to read about all the cool features.
One 3ds Max
The first thing you will notice is that we have moved 3ds Max to a single flavor. We no longer are offering a separate “Design” version. For me this is great news and no longer any need to worry about testing and support of your commercial plugins or scripts for two different versions of 3ds Max. As a result of this product decision, please note there are two APIs that have been marked deprecated:
EProductID GetProductID(); (utilitf.h)
APPLICATION_ID GetAppID(); (plugapi.h)
Binary Compatible Release
This release is also considered binary compatible with 3ds Max 2015. What does this mean? Any C++ plugins that are working for 3ds Max 2015, will simply just work in 2016 without needing to be recompiled. The Visual Studio requirements are the same, and the SDK compatibility was maintained. Also the exchange store experience is supported for both versions. For example, if you have already published a 2015 app in the exchange store, it should just work in 2016 with no changes. Yes, the 2016 version will not even care if the package is saying 2015 only. The key thing for you to do with an exchange app is to update any text, to indicate it is also supported in 2016. Of course it never hurts to test your app. :-) Please remember if you want to support both 2015 and 2016, use the 2015 SDK to ensure proper compatibility.
API Changes
There were also some new features and changes made to the SDK. You can use those new features in 2016 only versions of plugins. See the documentation for all the new SDK features online here: 3ds Max 2016 What's New in the SDK.
Public Debug Symbols
We have also uploaded the 3ds Max 2016 debug symbols to the symbol server. You can immediately take advantage of full debugging capability in this new release. As always, these symbols are on http://symbols.autodesk.com/symbols and you do not need to change anything in your Visual Studio debug settings if you already are directing to the symbol server. For full details, see this post: 3ds Max Public Debug Symbols and Plugin testing.
#BiggestMaxEver !!!