Is project tool guaranteed to be backward compatible?

BruceC

Hi,
For example, if a new project tool is released in the future frameworks, will it guaranteed to work with old frameworks?

An another example, can I use ProjectTool_S24.zip to build R21 SDK? I know it builds, but are there any concerns? or is it recommended to use ProjectTool_R21.zip to build R21 SDK?

Thanks!

ferdinand

Hey @BruceC,

Thank you for reaching out to us. No, project tools are neither upwards nor downwards compatible. The project tools are also not released in the frameworks, that is the source processor (for which the same rules do apply). Some of the inputs of the project tool can be found in the frameworks folder, but that is far from the whole project tool.

It is just the case that we did not release a new project tool since S24, so all versions of Cinema 4D since then use the same project tool. But when we before released a new project tool, this usually meant that we modified the Cinema 4D/plugins solution substantially. Not using the correct project tool can result in:

Failure to generate a solution, or malformed solutions, resulting in 2 and 3.
Compilation of a solution fail.
Binaries compiled with such a solution are fully or partially incompatible with the Cinema 4D versions they are intended for.

S24 is the last project tool we will ever release. In the future, SDK solutions will be generated with CMake. We still neither have an ETA for the release of such CMake setup nor can we yet say what its compatibility range will be.

And the following warning from the C++ docs does also still apply:

Please also note, MAXON's SDK Team only provides support for the official workflow and may not be able to help with issues arising from custom tool chains.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

BruceC

Thank you very much for the clarifying, @ferdinand