Blender Launcher - thoughts and suggestions?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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As Blender has continued to develop and improve, I’ve noticed that there are some aspects that either cause issues with some of my older .blend files, or things that work better (Blender’s included LWO converter in 2.41 is still the most accurate converter I’ve used).

This leads me to have multiple blender version installed on my system at any one time (not to mention the occasional SVN or special build). So here is my thought, and I’d love to hear some feedback from people about how well / useful this would work…

I’m thinking of building a Launcher application for Blender. It would be Windows based (that’s the OS I use most). When you open it it will have a list of Blender versions (configured via menus) to choose from using radio buttons. You can add / remove different versions of Blender, configure where it looks for a common .B.blend file, a file browser so you can launch directly into a selected .blend file, etc. After you have all the options set and you hit a “Launch” button, it passes all the info to Blender via command line options.

Anyone out there think this would be a worthwhile endeavor, or am I spinning my wheels?

Any thoughts would be helpful,

Eric “GuitarEC” C

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in windows XP do this…

rename your .blend file to something like .B241 and .B242.

now right click on the file you made, and choose open with, and then choose to browse your hard disk to find the executable to the blender version you want.

You can do this in linux too, but I only suggest doing it within a file browser. If you manually try changing the MIME settings to anything over 3 charictors will break the octree thing-a-ma-jig and you wont be able to open anything.

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Thanks for the tip - I’ll give that a run (I know that there are some .B.blend file settings that don’t play nice with older version of Blender).

However, this still leaves me with multiple (right now, no less than 6) icons on my desktop for the different versions / builds of the Blender application itself.

This idea I had was to consolidate all those icons into a single Launcher App that can then launch whatever version (with whatever options) in a simple to use interface…

Hope that clarifies what I was meaning,

Eric “GuitarEC” C

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yea, your idea sounds like a good one, you have my vote.

I just mentioned teh above tip, because that is what I do sometimes.

your idea would be a great utility :slight_smile: