Window stalking

[warpcat]

Heh, I wasn't saying your way didn't work, I thought you wanted to know other ways to do it. I probably "phrased" it wrong. The way I mentiond "I think" is like calling the print command 3 times... your method actually concatanates the items into a large string... and as you said, both valid. Ah, the syntax is already being confused....

[macaronikazoo]

woohoo! i dunno if you guys have tried this but communicating with maya through python is rockinly easy... well sort of. hope this isn't too noob for anyone.

basically, just open up a commandPort:
commandPort -n ":5055";

and then in IDLE, type this in:

maya = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
maya.connect(("127.0.0.1", 5055))

thats made the connection, and now all you have to do, is send messages to the maya object:

maya.send("print "hullo all you crazy peeps!n"" )

the only problem, is that when i look at whats recieved back from maya using:

print maya.recv(1024)

I get a bunch of error messages back from maya... things like:

// WARNING: unknown result type

i don't quite understand that bit... anyway, thought I'd share the joy, simple as it is.

[goggle]

I've given some thought to doing something like this to encapsulate my MEL scripts. Write a 3rd party program using Python or some other language that talks to Maya through the command port and then compile that program so it's binary and not easily readable. But maybe I'm just paranoid. :-7

At one job me and another scripty guy used to mess around with the command port. We'd open a copy of Maya on one of the old unused machines and then telnet into that port and pass commands to maya. The biggest problem we ran into was the weird return stuff and the fact that we could only pass one line at a time. We were working on a Maya-based chat system when that project finished up.

-James

[goggle]

hmmm,... "NameError: name 'socket' is not defined

[goggle]

Whoops,... had to

import socket

first.

[macaronikazoo]

i just found out that apparently the weird return stuff is only thrown when a command doesn't return anything. its maya's way of saying "eveything's normal"... go figure.

[warpcat]

Actually, I think your problem with that is telnet itself, at least on a windows machine. I did some tests, and telnet apepars to work differently on other systems, specifically linix and unix. Meaning, it "works properly" in linix and unix, but on windows, it has the "error" you reported (only firing off one command at a time). Anwyay, the point is, if you use a different piece of software to access the command port in windows, you can pass in whole lines of code (like your chat system would want). No errors, Maya behaves just like one would expect it too. I use putty, which you can get for free here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
I'd putty into someone's machine, start creating spheres, moving them around, printing text, it was pretty funny...

[warpcat]

Hey, that worked great! Not too noob for me