Current progress and more – features coming soon in 9.5

Our current progresses and what to expect soon for 9.5

Greetings to all,

This is our updating post about what’s coming soon in Muster 9.

We just released Muster 9.0.14 that fixed some minor bugs, introduces the Houdini universal connector as well as some new features like GFX limiting, instances borrowing and GFX processes masks. This closes the release cycle for version 9.0.
9.0.14 is tagged as LTS (Long term support), that means further bug fixes will be introduced in minor builds (9.0.14.x) but no further development for improvements will be carried on. Our development branch has been completely switched to 9.5.

So what to expect in 9.5 ?

Muster 9.5 will update a lot of underlaying libraries to the latest version, the most important switch are QT to version 5.12 LTS , Python to 3.6 and Pyside to Pyside2. While on the user side, this introduces minor differences (some Pyside scripts needs a little rework), switching to QT 5.12 automatically brings new features (like the support for high DPI displays) and limitations, mostly on the OS X platform. To stick with the CY2020 VFX reference platform, QT 5.12 is mandatory and raises the minimum supported platform for Mac OS X to version 10.12 that is relatively new. That’s why we’ll continue to support 9.0.14 for at least one year for bug fixes. It is also important to understand or Mac users that 10.14 and 10.15 introduces mandatory application signing and notarisation, that means at a certain point, you won’t be able to work with the older versions of our applications as well as other producers.
Also the minor requirements for Linux will be raised to glibc 2.17 while Windows will stay to Windows 7 or greater.

From a features point of view, we have plans to introduce automatic upgrades, rental licensing, automatic licenses activation and relocations as well as mobile notifications trough an iOS and Android app and a cloud connection to our services. Also in the 9.5 branch, we plan to introduce a platform agnostic file dependancy scanner that works in tandem with local files rendering (automatic transfer of files on local machines, and transfer back of rendered frames). It is still not clear how we’ll structure the system as well as if we will use P2P technologies or not, but this will be the building block to have seamless rendering on cloud machines in the future without worrying to setup an external synchronisation tool.

We have also plans to either rework our internal web server to support web sockets, or switch to a complete different library (Actually we use a proprietary web service). This will allows the web interface to receive on demand instant updates instead of using REST APIs pooling as it is happening in 9.0.x.

There’re also some nice things we planned like the complete management of skins/icons/colours customisation on the Dispatcher, configurable at the user profile level, the switch of all our icons and graphical elements to SVG for optimal resizing on any display and a couple of interface reworking.

As always stated, do not hesitate to contact us for a suggestion, an enhancement request or whatever else, we are always happy to stay in touch with our customers and receive feedbacks.

Stay tuned!