Over the weekend, we released new agents for both the Windows and Mac platforms. While not too much has visually changed, there have been some notable changes in the code guts. There has been a fair amount of refactoring in the agents, so be on the lookout for minor bugs.
On Windows, one of the two most substantial changes are that the agent executables are now publicly signed. We hope this helps to keep the anti-malware software vendors off our backs. Additionally, it should add another level of trust in our applications, as it is now externally validated as coming from us. The other substantial change is that we have moved to a flat file build, rather than a packaged single-file executable, for all new builds. 2.65 is the last single-file build, so new versions will only be a flat file build going forward. This will look a bit prettier in Task Manager, as there will be only one executable listed as a running process. Another nice side effect of this is that it will be much easier to run the Windows agent in Wine under Linux. We still don’t have a native Linux agent, but having a flat file Windows agent makes operation in Wine far simpler.
There have been a number of small tweaks and changes to the agent as well. Cinema 4D users will notice that we no longer request them to specify an output format. We are reading that from their scene files during the farm-side analysis pass. This also enables us to support using the Arnold Dummy output for the primary C4D output, so AOV’s can be defined to specify what the desired output should be. Windows users will now notice a “Quit” and “Run at startup” button/box. The agent won’t display a GUI each time you log in now and it runs on startup. No need to bother you.
All users will notice we’ve grouped the render apps on the Submit Job tab vertically, with versions listed horizontally. We thought this was cleaner and easier to find exactly what you need. Thanks goes to Son of Superdev for all the agent work. He’s doing a great job keeping us on track towards a solid and feature-packed agent.
Oh, and there might be a few new app versions supported by the 2.65 agents.
