> Regarding - XSI 32bit plugins runnable in XSI 64bit?
>
> 64 bit apps cannot load dlls compiled with 32 bits. All the pointers are
twice as big so the generated code is completely different. So all 32bit
plugins need to be recompiled for 64 bit. Fortunately it is not usually too
hard to port a tool to 64 bits - most C++ API code needs no modification at
all.
Does this mean that if we currently use addons, they will have to be
recompiled in order to use the in 64bit?
(and you can only recompile if you have the source code I suppose?)
if so, that is going to be a big problem for most users I think.
> XSI 5.0 plug-in wizards and sdk examples will include Visual Studio
.vcproj files for 64 bit compilation.
>
> Also XSI can support providing both 32-bit and 64-bit self-installed
plugins in the same workgroup directory so it will be possible to mix 64 and
32 bit machines on the same workgroup. And 32/64 bit Shader .dlls can can
also be supported on a hetreogeneous workgroup.
>
> Regarding - 32bit applications on 64bit systems, possible?
> Yes, the 64 bit version of Windows XP has backward compatibility support
to run Win32 applications.
>
I wasnt going to bring this up as a native 64-bit version of XSI is in the
make, and very soon available,
but I'm running XSI 4.2 32-bit on a win x64 and find it has issues.
I m using it only for rendering scenes, made on my 32 bit workstation, so I
cant comment on using it interactively.
But the machines hangs at the end of each rendering, requiring to manually
kill XSI.
Rendering from the UI is working very well, but each time one render, then
it hangs.
No skipping frames, rendering several scenes through a script, and
unfortunately XSIbatch is crashing all the time.
For the addon shaders I noticed that if you had to add some dll's (like the
msvcr70.dll and so) it didnt work by putting them in windows/system32, only
in the xsi/application/bin directory.
This might be totally dependent on my installation, I dont claim to be this
to be the expected behaviour of XSI 32bit on winX64, but I would just say:
try it on one station before you decide to move all of them over. (which is
what I did with win2k and XP too)
I guess if you have a lot of other apps in 32bit, that are not going to be
ported anytime soon, some caution would be wise.
but the good news: the render times!
its a dual dualcore opteron, and it's consistenly (at least) 4 times faster
than my single proc AMD.
(if you take into consideration scene preprocessing time that runs single
threaded.)
Peter
---
Unsubscribe? Mail Majordomo(at)Softimage.COM with the following text in body:
unsubscribe xsi
