Hey everyone,
This is my first post here, so bear with me. 
I got a little bit frustrated after I had a crash and didn’t save for a while, and I lost an entire evening’s worth of work; so I wrote a little ZTool autosaver.
I got some good results on my home and work machine, so I thought I’d share it at ZBC.
http://www.maphart.com/uploads/files/ZPlugs/AutoSaver35.rar
You can use this tool as a backup utility or either your main saving util.
I hope you guys find it useful!
Homme Homme
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The link is broken… Also, does it work with Z4?
The link should work now.
And I can’t say if it works in Z4, haven’t found any time yet to test it to be honest.
It works flawlessly with ZBrush 4! This is the most useful plugin ever, thank you so much. Yesterday I lost an hour of work, it’s so good to have this.
A small word of warning here. This is an excellent idea and many people have longed for such a feature but there is a fundamental flaw with writing a zscript plugin for timed saves: only one plugin/zscript can be active at a time. This means that if the user activates a different plugin while working (for example, SubTool Master or changing brush size using the [ & ] keys) this one will cease to be active. This pretty much ruins the auto save feature.
I’ve not looked closely at the plugin but perhaps you could add in a ‘Refresh’ button so that the timing could be restarted. (I don’t know how you are storing variables but using memory blocks will mean that these persist throughout a ZBrush session whereas ordinary [VarDef s are lost.) Users would have to refresh the plugin manually but perhaps it would still be useful for those that like auto-saves.
You’re absolutely right marcus_civis, and I am well aware of the limitations that come with ZScript. But there’s nothing I can do about that I’m afraid. Unless Pixologic finally allows multiple plugins running at the same time (and fix that horrendous “[Sleep] not working if you’re idleing” bug).
I have a couple of “failures” of my plugin as well, sometimes paired with using image plane.
If there’s a lot of interest, I could look into building a little applicationl that communicates to ZBrush by invoking a zsc every n ticks of the timer, but I wouldn’t know how to get around to doing that. Supposedly, it could be done; as my co-worker told me once he used that technique to have 3D mouse support in ZB. Not sure how much of that was thin air though. 
I am using a combination of mem blocks and VarWrite/Reads into VarDef variables. Not the most elegant solution, but it worked for me at the time.
I’m quite busy with my iPhone game (mage-maze.com) at the moment, but I’ll have a looksie at that refresh button when I get some spare time.
You’re absolutely right marcus_civis, and I am well aware of the limitations that come with ZScript. But there’s nothing I can do about that I’m afraid. Unless Pixologic finally allows multiple plugins running at the same time (and fix that horrendous “[Sleep] not working if you’re idleing” bug).
I have had a couple of “failures” of my plugin, most of them coming from using image plane.
If there’s a lot of interest, I could look into building a little application that “pokes” ZBrush and invokes a zsc every n ticks of the timer using a hacky method, but that’s going to require a bit of brainjuice. But supposedly, it could be done; as my co-worker told me once he used that technique to have 3D mouse support in ZB.
I am using a combination of mem blocks and VarWrite/Reads into VarDef variables. Not the most elegant solution, but it worked for me at the time.
I’m quite busy with my iPhone game (mage-maze.com) at the moment, but I’ll have a looksie at that refresh button when I get some spare time.