I've noticed that there are no daily builds of H15 on Daily Builds page
so the latest one seems to be production build 15.0.244.16
however journals are already till 15.0.270
is it an oversight or are we not supposed to have access to them yet?

You're not supposed to have access to them yet, but you will…..soon.

can't wait

Daily builds are back!

Cue the celebration!

Cheers,
Rob

I'm certain I've read an explanation somewhere, but don't remember where and what it was… anyway, what's with the size of the new builds? Almost double.

lots of new stuff

2 fully rigged characters
some materials with textures
etc

Can the superfluous stuff be a separate download?
<300 to >600 is serious bloat.
Also causes more work when optimizing $HFS for distribution to other machines.

cpb
Can the superfluous stuff be a separate download?
<300 to >600 is serious bloat.
Also causes more work when optimizing $HFS for distribution to other machines.

+1

Luke Letellier

cpb
Can the superfluous stuff be a separate download?
<300 to >600 is serious bloat.
Also causes more work when optimizing $HFS for distribution to other machines.

+1

yes please

I've said this in another thread, but was shut down for my apparent blasphemy:
Houdini needs an optional update function.
With optional I mean that the daily builds should still be available, but instead of pulling and installing the whole installer you should be able to just pull the updates within Houdini.
The bandwidth that could be saved is only growing. The time that could be saved on installs is only growing. The technological foundation existed for ages. So the only reason not to do it, is the effort that goes into developing the update system. Should be worth it in the long run, though.

DASD:

there are several rather large problems with incremental updates. It is, in a way, a mechanism typically used in “one artist on one workstation” kind of scenarios. Once you roll out to large farms and many workstations, you don't want an individual component mucking about with your setups. You want clean, atomized, self-contained packages that you can roll out with your own mechanism and not have a dubious updater polluting your system.

Also, since Houdini is a rather fast moving target and quickly advancing (and also: changing) you rarely have *one* install of it, that you could update. You typically have at least one build per project, simultaneously, rolled out everywhere. The beauty of the current system is, that builds and everything are completely independent of each other. A client needs a change on an older project? Roll out the build that was archived along with the actual data in the backups, without messing up the 10 other builds sitting on the farm, and just flip the environment within your render management.

Of course, at the price of larger downloads.

Again: The daily builds should still exist.

The thing is, with the Indy option and the use of Houdini in game development you get lots and lots of one-seat scenarios. In a game company you typically have only one or two technical artists that work with Houdini. The same is true for small and one-person companies (freelancers).

Aside from that, your separate installation argument does not hold up at all.
First of all, you can install a Houdini version especially for your current project (CProgramms/SideFX/Houdini_ProjectA) and you just update that one for that project. You could then give an admin the option to update an entire company at once. That way, a tech lead artist could test the latest daily build and if it works fine, he/she would give the ok for a company-wide update. And if something breaks, you could still install an older version. In total it's still faster and about as secure as any other update process. And you can update your seats relatively quickly and easily.

And what is dubious about an updater inside a program? We are not talking about malware, here. We are talking about an updater for a professional product. It's basically just a version tool like git, but it can only compare and pull.

DASD
And what is dubious about an updater inside a program? We are not talking about malware, here. We are a talking about an updater for a professional product.

It's probably a cultural thing.
I come from a unix background. And I would guess (even though I don't have any numbers to back it up) that the vast majority of Houdini seats sold are on Linux, for a number of reasons.
Programs don't load their own updates there. It's just not how it works (if not for anything else then for security reasons).

But even in the windows world, the two worst villains over the last 20 years were the Java updater and the Quicktime updater :wink:

Even if Linux used to be the main platform for Houdini (which I doubt), I doubt it will stay that way.

Most game devs work on windows (because almost all PC games run on Windows and the dev tools for consoles run on Windows).

Anyways, the Java updater sucks, because it essentially tries to sell you stuff at every update. It is a kind of Malware.
But the Epic Games Launcher, Steam, League of Legends Launcher and many other beloved programs and games have very decent automatic updates.

While I do like the way Steam works, and I do like the way Adobe Creative Cloud works (same as Steam), you do give up control with that type of approach.
However, my Creative Cloud installation has a very low degree of customization and internal development on top of it.
The complete opposite is true about Houdini. On my workstation there are at the moment builds from 12 to 15 (3 builds of 15, actually), and I want that control.
The changes between versions are too big and unpredictable.

You offer Epic Launcher as an example, but they don't update the UE versions, they install them in parallel while strongly recommending to duplicate your projects before porting them to a new engine version. So what they do is identical to Houdini, only with a bit nicer frontend.

Obviously the updater should not be fully automatic. We all agree on that.

It should give you the option to update any of your installed Houdini versions to any available higher daily build version.

So basically, if you click the update manager the following happens:
1. You are prompted which Houdini installation on your PC you want to update. (Dropdown of found installation locations and a browse option.) Press “next”.
2. You are offered a dropdown of daily builds with a higher version number (starting at the latest). This list does not include updates to higher versions. (So you cant update a Houdini 14 installl to Houdini 15 automatically.)
Press “next”.
3. You press ok, it checks files, downloads and installs. You are done.

Yeah so lets make things even more complicated, just download the thing …

Incremental updates are not reliable at all.

You can't predict what dependencies will get broken with new version.

You would have to keep special, separated incrementally updatable version and main version.
When something goes wrong and it will, you have to be able to roll back quickly to main version.

With incremental updates it's impossible to properly roll back once the update was done.
You cannot use clean install as it's result could be different then seqence of 100 incremental updates (you would have to keep archived differences to be able to go back and the time it takes to do rollback to certain version could be really long).

I can't see any benefit, except internet bandwith and disk space.
None of those two thing is problem nowadays.
If it's problem in your environment, don't do daily updates, you don't have to, most of the things will work.

@pezetko
If several incremental updates don't get you the same result as one clean install, the updater is complete trash and its programmer(s) should consider changing professions.

Dependencies would break, if the updater overwrote locally edited files inside the installation directory. For example, this could be a document containing environment variables. If that was ever necessary, the updater could spit out a warning of some sort and back up the locally edited file. Such “dependencies” would also have to be restored if you do a full install. With the updater you would at least know why things suddenly don't work any more.

The main version would be the version you keep updating. If something actually breaks you can install a previous build from the daily builds and work on that. On average, a good updater would save all users a lot of time.
Think about it this way: Every modern game with online features has an automatic update function. And it works. It works so well, that you never hear a scandal about how it does not work. It simply does not happen, nowadays. Servers might be down or slow, but nobody has reason to complain about modern automatic updates.

Daily Houdini updates are not necessary for everyone all the time. I do not believe that. Never the less, bugs that affect many users are fixed about every other day and important features get added frequently, too. I find myself updating at least once a week, because of updates that actually influence my work. I suspect I am not the only one.

-
I do not have numbers, but I think the feature would pay for itself. I think it is worth calculating.

DASD
I do not have numbers, but I think the feature would pay for itself. I think it is worth calculating.

Log on and click download - 25 seconds.
Double click installer and install - ~2 min.
Update shortcut to Houdini - 15 sec

Total time ~3 min.