Did you ever run into a program that would have been able to perfectly run on its own without your interaction, but which was notorious for randomly crashing so you still always needed to have an eye on it to restart it when necessary? (I’m looking at you here, 3ds Max!)

Well, I did and more often than I liked. So I decided to act and write a program that would carry out this annoying task for me. Now I am aware that there are already a number of other programs out there which carry out this task quite well, however the ones I found all lack one feature: customizable command line arguments. That is, an option to automatically modify the arguments the application is given each time it is restarted.

In the case of 3ds Max, this would be used to skip rendering the frames which have already been rendered (without doing this, restarting the crashed program would not make a lot of sense).

So… yeah… here’s a program which can do all that stuff. Download it right here. To run the .exe, you must have the Visual C++ 2012 runtime libraries installed. Or you could just compile the included source files yourself using a compiler of your choice (and maybe add some more functionality you think is still missing).

As for compatiblity: for Windows Vista and 7 you will need to have UAC disabled or run the program as an administrator or it might not work. For Windows 8 you must explicitly run the program as an administrator even with UAC disabled because, well, it’s Windows 8, and HOW DARE YOU QUESTION THE WINDOWS GOD?! For some programs it will even work without admin rights, but no guarantee.