VRay 3.xxx & VRay Next SDK compatibility

[tysonibele]

I have a VRay-dependant plugin that I was previously building against VRay 3, now I'd like to build against 4 but it seems some changes were made to the SDK that's preventing me from doing that.

Is there a way to maintain compatibility between both versions? Or must I release separate versions of my plugin for each version of VRay? The breaking changes related to instancing that I'm noticing seem somewhat superficial (passing RayServerInterface vs RayServerInterface2 in a few places, using ShadeVecs instead of Vectors in a few places, a deprecated function, etc)....using macros to swap between the class names depending on which VRay I target results in successful builds....but I can't find a way to unify the two. I'm guessing no such compatibility is planned since 3 is a legacy version at this point (I see no 3.XXX installers for 2020 available for download)

Any tricks I can use to avoid doubling up the number of builds I have to make?

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

Unfortunately you are right - the V-Ray 3 and 4 SDK are not compatible and the changes are more complex than only name changes and deprecated functions. For example the change from Vector to ShadeVec involves a change from 3 floats (in Vector) to 4 floats (packed in __m128 ) and so on..

As far as I know other people split the strictly V-Ray related functionality in a separate DLL and only it links to the V-Ray dlls and then they have different dlls for the different V-Ray version. The rest of the code stays in the main plugin dll and loads a different dll depending on the installed V-Ray version.

Best regards,
Yavor