How do people manage versioning their PiPLs?

Question

I asked this in the general forum initially but this is a more appropriate place. It's mind boggling how difficult it is to find the forums for these software packages to the casual participant.

I have a pair of plugins that I maintain for an enterprise application. These plugins are released alongside the external applications for which they're developed. A new version of the plugins is released every six months or so, and many users have several versions of the plugins installed at the same time so that they can just pick and choose based on the version of the other apps they're targeting.

This was all well and good, until After Effects CC 2019. Now, only the first plugin alphabetically gets loaded. The others are completely ignored as far as I can tell; the EntryPointFunc isn't called. The contents of the PiPL file aren't terribly well documented (at least, not in the AE SDK Guide PDF), it just sort of vaguely says "there's stuff in there but don't worry about it just use one from the sample code." It even goes so far as to wrap the section up with "Why do I need to know all of this? You don't..."

So basically my users are screwed. Going forward I guess I can try to implement something in here which does stuff to do things but... What do I do? What does the "Version" mean? How should I update these files so that multiple installations of the same plugin works? The plugin installers already tag the installation plugin names with the version, e.g. MyPlugin-1.0.aex, MyPlugin-1.1.aex, etc. (It doesn't really matter but they're actually symbolically linked into the Plug-ins folder from elsewhere.)

My preference would be for Adobe to revert this "new intelligence which skips loading plugins that might already be loaded" check since it cannot actually be accurate ever (since it's based on alphabetic order). My next preference would be for this file to be documented or have a reference to where to find that documentation in the PiPL section of the AE SDK Guide.

Here's my PiPL, for all of the plugins:

#include "AEConfig.h"  
  
resource 'PiPL' (16000) {  
    {    /* array properties: 7 elements */  
        /* [1] */  
        Kind {  
            AEGP  
        },  
        /* [2] */  
        Name {  
            "MercuryAEExport"  
        },  
        /* [3] */  
        Category {  
            "General Plugin"  
        },  
        /* [4] */  
        Version {  
            196609  
        },  
        /* [5] */  
          
#ifdef AE_OS_WIN  
#ifdef AE_PROC_INTELx64  
        CodeWin64X86 {"EntryPointFunc"},  
#else  
        CodeWin32X86 {"EntryPointFunc"},  
#endif  
#endif  
    }  
};

Anonymous · Answer

If you want to have different versions of a plugin to be active in parallel within one AE session, you need to give them unique "AE_Effect_Match_Name" fields in the PiPL.

Furthermore, the version number you report in PF_Cmd_GLOBAL_SETUP by filling the field out_data->my_version needs to match the "AE_Effect_Version" field in the PiPL exactly. There is a convenience macro PF_VERSION and some more information provided in the AE_Effect.h header file:

/** -------------------- Version Information ----------------------------------

**

** Please use these macros for designating the version information

** of your plug-ins. Should After Effects encounter more than one version

** of a specific plug-in when it starts up, it will use this information

** to decide which plug-in to honor. The plug-in version information

** (field 'my_version' in the PF_OutData) should be set at GLOBAL_SETUP

** time.

**

** This version information is meant for your version control, and should

** not be confused with the min_version and desired_version fields in the

** PF_OutData structure, which refer to the version of the PF specification.

**

**/

#define PF_Vers_BUILD_BITS 0x1ffL

#define PF_Vers_BUILD_SHIFT 0

#define PF_Vers_STAGE_BITS 0x3L

#define PF_Vers_STAGE_SHIFT 9

#define PF_Vers_BUGFIX_BITS 0xfL

#define PF_Vers_BUGFIX_SHIFT 11

#define PF_Vers_SUBVERS_BITS 0xfL

#define PF_Vers_SUBVERS_SHIFT 15

#define PF_Vers_VERS_BITS 0x7L // incomplete without high bits, below

#define PF_Vers_VERS_SHIFT 19

// skipping these bits for similarity to Up_Vers_ARCH_*, currently unused in PF

#define PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH_BITS 0xfL // expand version max from 7 to 127

#define PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH_SHIFT 26

// b/c we are stripping the stand alone vers value for two fields

#define PF_Vers_VERS_LOW_SHIFT 3

#define PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH(vers) ((vers)>>PF_Vers_VERS_LOW_SHIFT)

#define PF_VERSION(vers, subvers, bugvers, stage, build) \

(A_u_long)( \

((((A_u_long)PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH(vers)) & PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH_BITS) << PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH_SHIFT) | \

((((A_u_long)(vers)) & PF_Vers_VERS_BITS) << PF_Vers_VERS_SHIFT) | \

((((A_u_long)(subvers)) & PF_Vers_SUBVERS_BITS)<<PF_Vers_SUBVERS_SHIFT) |\

((((A_u_long)(bugvers)) & PF_Vers_BUGFIX_BITS) << PF_Vers_BUGFIX_SHIFT) |\

((((A_u_long)(stage)) & PF_Vers_STAGE_BITS) << PF_Vers_STAGE_SHIFT) | \

((((A_u_long)(build)) & PF_Vers_BUILD_BITS) << PF_Vers_BUILD_SHIFT) \

)

#define PF_Version_VERS(vers) \

(((((A_u_long) vers) >> PF_Vers_VERS_SHIFT) & PF_Vers_VERS_BITS) + (((vers >> PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH_SHIFT) & PF_Vers_VERS_HIGH_BITS) << PF_Vers_VERS_LOW_SHIFT))

#define PF_Version_SUBVERS(vers) \

((((A_u_long) vers) >> PF_Vers_SUBVERS_SHIFT) & PF_Vers_SUBVERS_BITS)

#define PF_Version_BUGFIX(vers) \

((((A_u_long) vers) >> PF_Vers_BUGFIX_SHIFT) & PF_Vers_BUGFIX_BITS)

#define PF_Version_STAGE(vers) \

((((A_u_long) vers) >> PF_Vers_STAGE_SHIFT) & PF_Vers_STAGE_BITS)

#define PF_Version_BUILD(vers) \

((((A_u_long) vers) >> PF_Vers_BUILD_SHIFT) & PF_Vers_BUILD_BITS)

enum {

PF_Stage_DEVELOP,

PF_Stage_ALPHA,

PF_Stage_BETA,

PF_Stage_RELEASE

};

typedef A_long PF_Stage;

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