Is there a way to get status messages during a simulation?

[vanpixelguy]

We are launching some rather long simulations and are noticing that PhoenixFD is somewhat silent during the simulation process. Although it does print information after each frame is simulated, there is no way to tell when the last frame was completed or how its progressing whilst working on a frame. We're running PhoenixFD under Maya on a farm in batch mode and the output files are going to a temp folder on the remote machine so the artist who launched the simulation does not have access to the files in order to view the timestamps. So what we are interested in is:

1. Is there a way to enable more granular information during the simulation, either via an environment variable or some debugging flag.
2. Or, would it be possible to optionally add the time at which each message is generated? For example, we currently get output like this:
PhoenixFD: frame 1208/1302 (81%) 122m 6s left
PhoenixFD: frame 1209/1302 (81%) 111m 51s left
PhoenixFD: frame 1210/1302 (81%) 101m 41s left
Would it be possible to have a mode were we could also display the time with each message? For example, instead print:
PhoenixFD [2017/Sep/22|14:22:07]: frame 1208/1302 (81%) 122m 6s left
PhoenixFD [2017/Sep/22|14:33:27]: frame 1209/1302 (81%) 111m 51s left
PhoenixFD [2017/Sep/22|14:43:07]: frame 1210/1302 (81%) 101m 41s left
This could be done by logging a message from a per-frame callback which is an option for us.

But if there is either a way to enable more granular output or to display the time the massage was output that would help.
Thanks.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Sure, timestamps and a finish message can be done quite easily. I will add messages for each step of the simulation, so when using more than 1 SPF, you'll be able to have more regular feedback, but I'm afraid this is as granular as it could get right now - Phoenix does not communicate with the main thread more often than once per step, so it can print message and update its the progress bars in GUI mode only that frequently.

Cheers!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

The changes will be in tomorrow's nightly builds

[vanpixelguy]

Thanks so much. This will be a big help in monitoring our job progress.

[rporter8555]

Is there any way to do this in Max with backburner?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

I'm afraid Backburner is very limited when it comes to running tasks that are not performing rendering. There are several possibilities and each of them has serious drawbacks, so we went ahead with the kind of integration which does not indicate progress and does not print info, but allowing everything else to work as usual. I hope we would find a better approach or Backburner would be extended with more customization options...