Questions about how you DL scripts
A few questions:
Do you use scripts you download from the internet? If not, why not? If so, how often do you look for or download scripts?
When you guys download scripts, where do you get them from? Scriptspot.com, highend3d.com, see them posted on forums, do you have personal sites bookmarked, etc.
How do you find/rate the experience of downloading and installing scripts? What are the most painful parts, what can be improved, what works well?
And finally, any additional comments you may have related to this query would be appreciated.
Do you use scripts you download from the internet? If not, why not? If so, how often do you look for or download scripts?
When you guys download scripts, where do you get them from? Scriptspot.com, highend3d.com, see them posted on forums, do you have personal sites bookmarked, etc.
How do you find/rate the experience of downloading and installing scripts? What are the most painful parts, what can be improved, what works well?
And finally, any additional comments you may have related to this query would be appreciated.
Replies
I mainly download from Scriptspot, Highend3D and simple links from forums. Now and then I find someone's personal site which has cool scripts on, and I will download them to try out.
Downloading and installing scripts is usually fairly straightforward if they're standalone, one-file thingies (.ms or .mel, run-once or hotkey type of things).
However it seems like pretty much everyone out there has a different idea of where scripts should go, what subfolders to use, some include icons which need different paths too. Most of the time there's at least a half-decent readme.txt with basic instruction steps, but sometimes even this is lacking.
When I was setting up an ETQW MD5 export script installer for max, I just put it all in a .mzp file with instructions to do MAXScript -> Run Script on that file. The .mzp included an "mzp.run" file which copied out all of the separate files into the correct locations relative to the max install path (with 2 different methods depending on if you were on an older version of Max with no My Documents setup, or 2008+ which uses the user folders). It then popped up a "completed install" messagebox with further tips on how to set up keyboard shortcut or toolbar buttons for the script.
IMHO that'd be the ideal way to install scripts for any app - a single file that you run once, it puts all of the files (MS, MCR, MEL, PY, icons, whatever) into the correct folders and maybe even adds toolbar/shelf buttons or menu items if requested.
There's far too much manual install faffery going on at the moment, and a lot of the time I see installs of Max/Maya with old/unused scripts lying around in strange places left over from when people were trying to figure out how to get the damn thing working!
I mostly come across them (on forums), rather than go looking for them.
-Forums/friends
-I think Mop covered that very well. Not entirely related, but a software synthesizer I use has its own format for automatically installing presets/skins/whatever just by dragging the file onto the program. Very foolproof and eventhough just dragging the files into their right folders isn't a problem, there's no law against streamlining it for those who need it. If there's an automatic thing like that though, I'd prefer if it was just a (renamed?) archive that I could also open with winrar for direct access to the files.
I know you're working on a script-browser for max, and I actually really like the idea!
And finally, any additional comments you may have related to this query would be appreciated.