PLUGIN: (Updated) Texture Monitor

[lisa]

Originally Posted by Dew

Hi lisa, curious as to why after plugin install AC3D keeps trying to get through my firewall and access the net? some kinda update thingy?

No, it's the texture monitor. It uses the network to talk to itself, basically.

AC3D plugins are normally single-threaded, which means they can only do one thing at a time, but I needed the texture monitor to be multi-threaded so your computer doesn't come to a grinding halt every time I check the disk. So, when you run the texture monitor plugin the texture monitor starts a new process in the background to monitor your disk for texture changes. When it sees a change, it uses AC3D's TCP\IP connector to tell AC3D that the texture has changed. That's the network traffic you're seeing.

[In case anyone isn't aware, AC3D has a TCP\IP slave\batch mode interface: super-cool stuff, an absolute must-have feature for production environments. Basically, what the interface lets you do is send commands to AC3D from a remote process, either on the same computer or over the network. If you're making games, this is the best way to automate your nightly builds!]

The plugin doesn't actually need to talk to any computers outside the local network, it just uses the local host for inter-process communications. Some firewalls are just on-off, but if you have a fancy firewall, it's perfectly safe to limit communication for the plugin to the local computer. It needs to be able to communicate locally, however, or the plugin won't work. There's more details in the readme.