Gilbert Osmond

Thanks for your all's replies so far. Is there a published *complete* list of all the little "Easter Egg" improvements that have been made? For example in another post someone mentioned that the Property Line tool underwent extensive renovation & improvements. It'd be great to see a complete list of every improvement in all the user-facing areas of Vectorworks. If JimW has access to such maybe he can post it somewhere? Such a list would help people find the little goodies that may help their personal workflow a lot, which they otherwise might not run into for weeks, months, or longer. ----- EDIT: Here's a complete list of new & improved features in VW2017

I haven't yet updated to VW2017, waiting to hear how it's working for others. If you're using VW2017 already please share: Did the installation / upgrade go smoothly? How is it working w/ your v2016 and/or earlier files? Does VW2017 seem stable enough to trust your workflow to? I did already see the separate thread on Renderworks changes & related issues in VW2017. No need to recapitulate that here. Thanks! ---- EDIT: Whoops, I don't know how this was posted under "Buying & Selling LIcenses". I had meant this post to go in the General forum. Mods, if you see this please consider moving this entire thread to the main / general VW forum. Thanks.

On a related but separate note, a question about restructuring of VW license costs now that Renderworks is included for ALL users: Are those of us who were paying for RW licenses separately in past years going to see any cost reductions? I.e. I assume RW license fees will now be eliminated as a line-item and we will just pay a single fee for our chosen package (Architect, Spotlight, Designer, etc.) -- will our fees for those base packages stay the same (resulting in an effectively lower total cost because there's no RW license fee,) -- or will the price for the base packages now increase to match whatever the Architect + RW, Designer + RW, Spotlight + RW, etc. fees were in past years? Not sure if I'm being clear here, phrased differently, I'm concerned / hoping that whatever cost changes may come are fair to people who formerly paid a lot extra for RW, now that everybody is getting it included at no additional cost.

After buying a used SpacePilot Pro (part #3DX-600037) about 4 or 6 months ago I had reason to call 3Dconnexion's live tech support for assistance w/ Vectorworks/Mac compatibility. My impression is that tech support consists of just 1 fellow who may have other job resposibilities and/or be an engineer (?). There was a notable air of condescension in his tone, really did not seem very interested in helping. Hard to assess based on one data point, perhaps the company is doing so well in other markets that it doesn't need VW users. Admittedly I *did* buy the unit second-hand but still, this is not some consumer widget for which tech-support is just a money-losing afterthought. Anyone who invests in 3dConnexion pointing device is likely to be the kind of person who passes along opinions of the product & the company to other potential buyers. I'm sure the market for high-performance multi-axis input devices in the CAD space is far from being saturated. 3DConnexion ought perhaps be more concerned not only with their product but with their company image & reputation for follow-up support. I did not find the SpacePilot Pro usable in VW2016. I haven't yet upgraded to the latest 3Dconnexion driver, nor VW2017. After I do both (when VW2017 SP1 is released) I will report back on this thread w/ my experiences and remarks.

Chiming in with another "thank you" to the NM/VW team(s) for VW2017. I haven't installed 2017 yet, I think I'll wait for SP1 to drop first, but I can see enough from the new-features list and from the videos. Fantastic series of upgrades and improvements. As a landscape-oriented person I particularly look forward to the improved Plant tools and drainage tools. This is my 3rd or 4th year on Service Select. VW2016 was a worthy upgrade but a little heavy on the "bells and whistles" enterprise-oriented stuff, VW2017 is the first release where I, as a small-time 1-person shop feel fully on-board with the Service Select program. I no longer feel like I'm being pressured to pay annually for a "one time purchase" product license (or else suffer the long-term upgrade cost consequences.) I now see VSS as a reasonable arrangement that helps NM/VW assess my level of committment to VW as a multi-year / multi-decade platform which needs ongoing and cost-intensive development to stay useful & competitive. (And in some areas to outperform or simply outclass the competition.) The new forums look great too by the way, thanks very much JimW and all.

This ^^^^ 100%. VW doesn't appear to be engineered to handle full-range multi-axis input, resulting in a clunky user experience that negates half the benefit of having a 3D pointing device in the first place. Look forward to seeing what the future brings, hopefully in VW2017 or at least VW2018, 3D nav will "just work" the way it does in Sketchup & other 3D apps.

iPad should never be more than a viewer for Vectorworks. The screen-space issue alone is a show-stopper. Add in the lack of pointing devices, lack of CPU/GPU/RAM, for doing additions/edits/deletions to objects & settings it's a non-starter. There is however a great need & future for iPad as a viewer & possibly even annotator of either native or iPad-specific-format VW files.

Invision Power Services: https://invisionpower.com Presumably IPS uses their own software to power their own community / support forums. Have a look at: https://invisionpower.com/forums/ Looks straightforward, very encouraging that all the features I was able to access without registering work fine on an iPad w/ Adblock browser.

I think the elevation value on Stake objects are broken. I fixed my other Vw issues by resetting my preferences, but I'm still having problems with the Stake's OIP Z-value not changing in 'Use as 2D graphic only'. If I change the Stake to 'Set Elev to site model' its Z-value changes, but I am trying to provide a spot elevation for the top of a retaining wall, which is not part of the site. If I change it back to 2D only, then the last elev from the site model shows, but I cannot change it by typing in a Z value on the OIP. I have had recently similar problems with stake objects not respecting typed-in Z-values in the OIP in VWD2016 SP3. As I recall I ended up deleting all the stake objs & re-entering them from scratch. Apparently only the initially-given Z-value is respected. Seems buggy.

Certainly agree that there should be per-viewport settings for a single heliodon instance, instead of having to do multiple heliodons & control them by class visiblity. Edit: oops, there IS a way to handle this, on the Lighting panel. As far as document-level heliodon, it'd streamline some projects to have a master heliodon location but if that was added as a feature it is important to be able to override it on a per-viewport / per-sheet basis. Think about the case where, for instance, you are designing a standardized building that will be used in different parts of the country / world, & you want to conveniently render it at different latitudes. Would not be fun to have to create separate documents & use linked viewports / layers to achieve that. The current free-form heliodon system handles this use case easily. Perhaps another option would be to expand the Heliodon tool settings w/ a checkbox or menu-drop down to designate a heliodon instance as "the master heliodon" for the document. As mentioned above, on the Viewport settings there could be a Heliodon date/time field that would set the viewport's date & time for that master heliodon. If there were multiple heliodons, those could be given names, & then any one of those named heliodons could be selected in the viewport's drop-down menu, i.e. to pick the desired location.

Before VR there was no credible path to matching the low cost, durability, portability, and all-weather readability of a 24"x36" or 36" x 48" sheet, in a flat-panel display form factor. VR has the potential (pending at least another 3-5 years of development, maybe more) to finally *start* to challenge paper ARCH-C and ARCH-D-size job site plans for some purposes. VR projection neatly side-steps the limitations of flat-panel displays, but even if 3D VR *totally* replaces printed plans, there will always be a need for clear 2D Top/Plan, Elevation, & Section VR projections at various scales. As VW develops it should never lose sight of the importance of being able to produce accurate & legible 2D slices of a model at any angle, distance, depth, or scale, including annotations.

With apologies for emotionality & for veering away from the specific topic, I for one can hardly wait to see the improvements in VW2017. Though I'm sure there will be various new features, perhaps even some I will use, I would be perfectly happy this year with a release that had *nothing* but refinements, speed improvements, and bug fixes.

do you mean Auto-Update? I think they already auto calculate, there is a preference for that. If auto-updating is added as a feature, it should be optional, as there are plenty of cases where you would not want the contents of a worksheet dynamically changing every time you added/edited/changed objects. For example if I'm adding plants to a landscape and I have qty. 10 or 20 of say 12 different species to add, I don't need the CPU / disk overhead of having a worksheet auto-update with every batch of plants added. I only need to update the worksheet when I'm finished adding plants. It would be nice to be able to control-click on a finished worksheet & choose from among "Auto-Update," "Manual Update," and "Update Now".

Worksheets interface desperately needs an overhaul. It's about as intuitive and user-friendly as Font-DA-Mover from System 6. (And some of the graphical hints in the Worksheet window also appear to hail from System 6.. from 26 YEARS ago....) VW Worksheet formatting tools appears to take their interface cues from Excel's "Cell Format" window + tabbed panes -- why not extend the metaphor & borrow Excel's handy toolbar for speeding up the most common style changes. Font styles, text/background color, cell borders, etc. A particular pet peeve of mine is the way the "sort" icons work. Clicking them is the intuitive behavior, but no, one must select a column, then *drag* one of the two sort icons onto the column.

This is encouraging to hear. I sure hope most or all of the older 3D Conn. Space Pilot series are mostly or fully supported. WADR for 3DConnexion they sure do seem to rev hardware a lot with few, perhaps *no* changes to the basic innovation of the 3d nav knob itself. As far as VW's support for / use of 3D nav using a true 3D controller, one holy grail (among several, I'm sure,) is simply to be able to use the full 6 degrees of freedom exactly as one does in the demo app that 3DConnexion provides with their driver software package.

BIG +1 on this, please add FULL support for 3Dconnexion products. As things are it seems kind of janky, certain axes only work in certain views, I can't get it to do complete 6-DOF movement. For the record I have the "SpacePilot Pro," part # 3DX-600037. (Agreed that 3dconnexion's product-naming hierarchy is confusing.)

General remark: Good on you, NM/Vectorworks, for giving a solid preview of some (many?) of the improvements likely to appear in 2017. The detailed info weighs heavily and in favor of a decision to continue my VSS subscription.

As an ongoing Designer + RW VSS subscriber I am relieved & encouraged to see that NM/VW is taking time to revamp, revise, polish, correct, clean up, streamline, and generally improve important parts of VW's core functionality. As a landscape designer I will appreciate the new Irrigation tools (if they make it into the 2017 release) too. The 2016 release (point cloud, Energos, etc.) had plenty of attention-grabbing power, 2017 appears to be some follow-through in the bread-and-butter minute to minute core functionality. Looking forward to downloading VW2017 -- SP2! I'll let the bleeding edge people work out the initial round of bugs.

Many forums have user-configurable preferences to accommodate a range of needs. I like systems that offer each forum user a range of choices: • Instant email notifications to every reply in every watched thread, OR • Daily, or weekly: 1 Summary email notification per watched thread, including headlines for all replies on that watched thread, OR • 1 weekly summary notifications of ALL watched threads, i.e. just 1 email per week listing which threads have changed, but not showing or summarizing the individual new replies on those threads. Some forums go so far as to allow this setting individually for every watched thread, but to me just having a single global preference would be fine.

As a work-around until it gets fixed in VW you can use a 3rd party utility like Default FolderX to set a specific default folder for any app, including VW. Also has a lot of other useful features such as Favorites, Recently-Opened, etc., all accessible from within any open/save dialog box. I like the Sets feature, allows you to configure arbitrary Sets of bookmarked folders which you can switch to using a keyboard shortcut. I.e. "Current Design" set might take you to a set configured to show the top folder level for all active design jobs. There is also a handy "last-visited" feature, you can hit up-arrow and it will take you back to the folder you selected *the previous time* an open/save dialog came up. I've been using Default FolderX for many years and have found it to be reliable, very stable, and well-maintained.

Huge ++1, I've made other comments similar to this in other threads & a few days back I started my own Wish-List thread on it.

I'm sure this has been requested before; I couldn't find the older posts though: Would like to be able to ESC out of any extended CPU operation, e.g. let's say I'm looking at a high-poly-count object (like a 3D plant model) with 50K or 100K polys, in OpenGL mode, and I switch (either by mistake or on purpose) to "Hidden Line" -- beach ball for 2 to 10 minutes while VW recalculates. At least VW2016 64-bit doesn't crash; that is an improvement, but being able to cancel / revert any long CPU-intensive process mid-stream, the way you can interrupt a Render operation, would be very useful. As it now stands the only options are to wait, or to force-quit.

+1 on automatic jargon expansion, there's no way regulars are going to type out "Object Information Pallette" every time, nor should they be expected to. +1 on better searching, agreed that Google often does a better job than the forum search engine. +1 on long-term Wiki with well-curated articles, so many questions occur over and over again. Also, a well-ordered keyword "tag" system so posts can be easily cross-referenced over multiple sub-forums. (E.g. a post can be tagged with, for example, "Architect" and "Spotlight" if both of those tags are relevant.) And, a thread-display system that shows replies in a sensible indented form, the way for example Reddit.com does. (Or, at least an option for the user to select that display format.)

Bumping this thread -- I very much want to buy a 3DConnexion SpaceMouse (one of these, pictured below, to be clear -- their product names are very confusing.) How is support under VW2016 SP2? Specifically: - Can this be used effectively for 3D modeling, making edits & changes to the model with most or all major tools without excessive automatic/forced shifts in view mode? Or is it just mainly for display purposes in Walkthrough mode? - Are the various short-cut side buttons directly supported in VW? Are they configurable? If they are not directly supported, can they be effectively re-mapped either through the 3DConnexion driver or through a 3rd party driver like USBOverdrive? I called 3DConnexion tech support about this and got the impression that their Mac support is a bit of an afterthought so I am hesistant to jump in and buy. Thanks for your replies.

Thanks for the suggestion, I was able to track it down quickly. I had a corrupted workspace in /Users//Library/Application Support/Vectorworks/2016/Workspaces. I removed the offending custom workspace and launch times are back to normla. In this case the workspace showed a pallette from the 3rd party plugin "Extensio," which is used to produce various kinds of piping & drainage runs. I'm not certain but it seems likely the Extensio plugin has something to do with it. And/or, what it might be is that I did *not* reinstall the Extensio plugin with my clean install of VW 2016. So probably VW 2016 was just searching for the plugin and then timing out, resulting in long delay.