Topics created by Havremunken

Hello @Havremunken,

no, you did everything correctly, the upper integer boundary is a bit overkill, but should work. Regarding CheckDirty, no, you do not have to enable something, you just replace the default implementation (which does nothing). And you do not need HierarchyHelp, my instructions might have been a bit misleading. You are evaluating/setting your own dirtiness here, so if there is a cache or not is irrelevant for you, you just implement additional factors which should make you dirty. As shown by the example in the docs, you could for example tie your own dirtiness to a change in time.

void CheckDirty(BaseObject* op, const BaseDocument* doc) { if (doc->GetTime()!=cached_time) { cached_time = doc->GetTime(); op->SetDirty(DIRTYFLAGS::DATA); } }

In your case you would probably just also make yourself dirty when your font object is dirty.

And yes, please share your code, I could speculate into other directions - you could also try NodeData::GetAccessedObjects - but that will lead to nothing when I send you off into random directions without a clear sense of what your code is doing.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi Ferdinand - I understand that is is complex and not something that you can easily give an answer to that would be correct in every situation.

For me the use case for this is 1:N, but when I read your first reply, it hit me that it could actually theoretically be useful with N:M too. At least 2:N, I doubt much more than that, but programming wise "two is many" - i.e. more than one, so programming for 2 and 1024 won't be much different, but if was only ever going to be 1 DP, that would make a difference.

I am leaning towards CommandData like you indicate, but I will experiment a bit with the code to actually set the text content parameter. I also have some other calculations that need to calculate based on for instance the bounding box of the text object after the text has changed, and I want to do this without ending up in some sort of document destroying hell. Don't be surprised if more questions show up eventually if I run into race conditions after I paint myself into a corner. 😉

Thanks again!

Thank you very much, Maxime! I'll check out the various points and open a dedicated thread if I have anything further to ask or say about these topics. 🙂

Thanks again, Ferdinand! I have been conditioned by other programming to fear and loathe anything that blocks the UI thread. However, the files that will be downloaded by users of my plugin would typically be in the 250-1000 bytes range, as long as the network isn't extremely slow I guess it should not be a huge problem.

I will do the blocking behavior for now, and then maybe start looking into Jobs or something if needed. 🙂

Hi Ferdinand,

Yeah, I'll need to do dirty checking for sure. Not because I am shipping this to any customers (unless I can find a good licensing framework 😉 ), but because the nature of my plugin is to create quite a few objects; We could easily reach 100s or even 1000s of objects, depending on the situation.

So I implemented primitive dirty checking from one of the links you provided, and this helps a LOT with the performance - as you're mentioning, just ignoring the cache and recreating everything every time GetVirtualObjects is called would effectively kill Cinema 4D. Especially when fiddling with parameters, as the algorithm to layout all the objects I am creating is quite intensive.

So I'm using your code from this topic https://developers.maxon.net/forum/topic/14936/difficulties-to-dedect-the-right-message-data/2 to make sure I do proper dirty checking for my own generator and all linked objects before I decide to return the cache or generate all objects again. I'm not done yet, but early tests seem pretty promosing.

Now if only there was a simple way to split the large python file into multiple files, then bundle them all together for one giant python file so I wouldn't have to mess with module paths. 1000 line code files get old real fast. 😄

Thanks again!

Many thanks for your help and thorough explanations, Ferdinand! Much appreciated!

I'll go create a temp document and clones, and don't expect much more resistance from this particular issue. Thanks again, and have a happy holiday season! 🙂