Maya 2023.3 hangs when loading our custom plugins at startup

[karl.loveridgeRKJJN]

We have been long time users of Maya and have several custom C++ plugins we've written. We are in the process of upgrading from Maya 2018 to Maya 2023.3. 

I have been able to recompile our plugins with the 2023.3 SDK and they will load and run in Maya 2023 when I use the plug in manager. This is great. Except for...

I enabled the plugins to autoload and then restarted Maya. Maya will not restart and hangs in the process of loading the plugins. I did some further reading and found that Maya 2023 has security measures for plugins, MEL and Python. I've disabled all these and it continues to hang. There is no feedback of what its stalling on.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[karl.loveridgeRKJJN]

Its looking like some of the initialization we have been doing in the past in the plugin start up partially might be to blame for this hang. Doing further investigating.

[karl.loveridgeRKJJN]

After further investigation, it appears that a convention we used to use to initialize callback's not longer works. This causes the hang:

MLL_EXPORT MStatus initializePlugin(MObject obj)

{

MStatus status;
MFnPlugin plugin(obj, "MyPlugin", "1.1.0", "Any", &status);

status = plugin.registerCommand(cmd_ztools, MayaTools::creator);

if (status != MS::kSuccess)
{
MGlobal::displayError(MString(cmd_ztools) + " command failed to initialize");
}
else
{
MGlobal::displayInfo(MString(cmd_ztools) + " command initialized");
scriptjob_newSceneOpened = MEventMessage::addEventCallback("SceneOpened", sceneOpened);
scriptjob_selectionChanged = MEventMessage::addEventCallback("SelectionChanged", selectionChanged);
}

Attempting to add the event callbacks causes the  hang. If I remove them in the plugin initialization, it works fine. So the question is why? 

[brentmc]

Thanks for the info. I'll ask around internally to see if I can get clarification on why this might be happening.

[brentmc]

Hi,

Can you verify that you are building your plugins with the correct compiler for 2023.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2023/ENU/?guid=Maya_SDK_MinimumRequirementsAllPlatforms_html

Otherwise, could you provide a sample plugin that shows the issue?

Thanks.

[karl.loveridgeRKJJN · Accepted solution]

So the issue turned out to be the way we were creating a callback on the idle event. We originally had the callback set up with this code:

g_idleEventCallbackId = MEventMessage::addEventCallback( "idle",
	&IdleEventCallback,
	NULL,
	&status);

This caused the hang. I switched both of these to this and it now works:

g_idleEventCallbackId = MTimerMessage::addTimerCallback(1.0f, &IdleEventCallback, NULL, &status);