I'm having trouble getting started using Plasma with 3DSMax 8. I got the plugins from Cyan's server in MOULaPlugins871.zip. I put the files MaxPlasmaLights.dlo and PlasmaMax.gup into the plugins directory.
At this point, 3DSMax 8 wouldn't launch, so I copied the requisite DLLs from my MOULa folder, skipping the two that already existed in the max folder. At that point, 3DSMax 8 launches, but crashes shortly after launch, saying An error has occured and the application will now close. Again I consult the wiki's, which were very helpful, and they said to go to the plugcfg folder and edit PlasmaMAX2.ini. This is where things go awry. There is no such file anywhere on my system. OK, so I create the file, and am very careful to get its contents right. I also made sure that the path the file points to exists, and there's also a dat subfolder there. But all of this makes no difference as Max still immediately crashes.
If I remove the PlasmaMax.gup file from the plugins folder, Max no longer crashes. The Plasma top-level menu item is still there, but all of the sub-entries are missing. I've tried re-downloading the plugin files from various sources with the same results. The file sizes are the same as those reported by others.
Update: As I was writing this post, I decided to check it out running as administrator. It gave me the option to re-select a rendering method. Where I originally set it up to use DX9, this time I told it to use OpenGL and it was fine. I'm not sure whether it's the admin part that makes it work or the running in OpenGL part, and I don't feel like finding out. But I'm going to keep this post up for future reference. It appears you can change this setting in 3dsmax.ini under [WindowState] about halfway down the file.
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