Hello,

short question, as I couldn't find information about this for R21: Does the R21 Trial load plugins?

Thanks & greetings,
Frank

I personally love C++ and wouldn't change my main programming language to anything else. But I have to admit that Python is quite handy for quick prototyping (though the missing debugging capabilities in Cinema really suck for bigger Python projects).

Right, that would be a way, thanks.

I was hoping to be able to do it in Python for now, because it makes prototyping so much easier. Just to see if my idea is working at all. But since it's a shader project, I'd have to move to C++ anyway, for performance reasons.

I guess I'll try that.

Hello,

is there a handy API function to find the nearest position on a geometry to a given point position?

I would like to be able to specify a position in space and get the nearest position on the surface of a polygon object.

Thanks & greetings,
Frank

Or, to put it differently:

I would like to have all times in UTC, without and time zone offsets being considered.

The current date I want to get in UTC (I already am). And I want to parse a date from a string, and that date should also be considered UTC without any time zone difference.

If only UniversalDateTime had a FromString() function...

That is, in deed, the background, and I would love to ignore the DST ;-)

But at least time zones I have to take care of, otherwise licenses of customers in e.g. China will expire a day early.

OK, thank you!

Thank you, that's what I suspected :-)

Hi,

I am still trying to wrap my head around LocalDateTime and UniversalDateTime.

LocalDateTime -> UniversalDateTime : time zone offset

I have this test code:

	// Format string for date parsing
	const Char* dateFormatString = "%Y%m%d";

	// Date string to parse
	String activationDateString("20191105"); // November 5th, 2019

	// Parse date from string
	maxon::LocalDateTime activationDateLocal = maxon::LocalDateTime::FromString(activationDateString, dateFormatString) iferr_ignore();

	// Zero out time values, as the parser gives me obscure times otherwise
	activationDateLocal._hour = activationDateLocal._minute = activationDateLocal._second = 0;

	// Convert activation date to UTC
	maxon::UniversalDateTime activationDate = activationDateLocal.ConvertToUniversalDateTime();

	// DEBUG: Print times
	DiagnosticOutput("DEBUG: @", maxon::String("Activation date LOCAL: ") + activationDateLocal.ToString(nullptr));
	DiagnosticOutput("DEBUG: @", maxon::String("Activation date UTC (converted from local): ") + activationDate.ToString(nullptr));

This is the readout:

DEBUG: Activation date LOCAL: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
DEBUG: Activation date UTC (converted from local): 2019-11-04 22:00:00

So far so good. I'm in Germany, so my time zone is +2 hours. But WAIT a second... we're on winter time currently, so shouldn't it rather be 1 hour difference? Let's see what the time zone difference is:

	DiagnosticOutput("DEBUG: @", maxon::String("Activation date LOCAL: ") + activationDateLocal.ToString(nullptr));
	DiagnosticOutput("DEBUG: @", maxon::String("Local time zone offset: ") + maxon::String::FloatToString(activationDateLocal.GetTimezoneOffset().GetHours()));
	DiagnosticOutput("DEBUG: @", maxon::String("Activation date UTC (converted from local): ") + activationDate.ToString(nullptr));

And here comes a surprise:

DEBUG: Activation date LOCAL: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
DEBUG: Local time zone offset: 1
DEBUG: Activation date UTC (converted from local): 2019-11-04 23:00:00

My time zone difference is in deed 1 hour, as I expected. But suddenly, the converted UTC is different from before (was: 22:00; is: 23:00)! Keep in mind, the only thing I changed in the code is that I added the second DiagnosticOutput() line.

Does LocalDateTime::GetTimezoneOffset() change values in the LocalDateTime object?? Is that why it's not const? Why do the SDK docs not mention this?

The only thing I want is:

1. Get the current date
2. Parse another date from a string
3. Comparing both dates to get their difference in days (I know how to do that already). Exact times are to be neglected, but of course time zones still play a role to get the correct date.

FromString() default result values

Also, on a general note: If I use LocalDateTime::FromString() to parse a date from string, why are the time values not at all initialized?

	// Format string for date parsing
	const Char* dateFormatString = "%Y%m%d";

	// Date string to parse
	String activationDateString("20191105"); // November 5th, 2019

	// Parse date from string
	maxon::LocalDateTime activationDateLocal = maxon::LocalDateTime::FromString(activationDateString, dateFormatString) iferr_ignore();

	// DEBUG: Print times
	DiagnosticOutput("DEBUG: @", maxon::String("Activation date LOCAL: ") + activationDateLocal.ToString(nullptr));

The readout is:

DEBUG: Activation date LOCAL: 2019-11-05 128:254:144

Why are the time values not zero'ed, or set to the current time, or anything that would make sense?

Greetings,
Frank

Update:

String test = "First line!\nSecond line!"_s;

Using this string in a STATICTEXT, does create a line break on Windows, but not on macOS... so how would it work on macOS? Of course, even on Windows it only works when the string is hard-coded, loading it with GeLoadString() does not work.