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I feel like this is something that sometimes happens to me - the selection handles get rotated like this, and I am not sure how or why (cannot replicate it trying just now). @xambo perhaps you can post an explanation of what fixed it.

Is it not the case that what you are looking at here is the selection box/handles rather than underlying vertices?

This doesn't answer my question though - what would "constructive feedback" look like, on this particular topic? There's a difference between negative criticism and non-constructive feedback. For me, criticising or objecting to a company's commercial strategy doesn't amount to criticism of the company's employees or the hard work they do, within the limits of the resources they are given.

This is not true at all. It's certainly not true for computing power. And it's not universally true for software either.

How would you define "constructive feedback" as far as the issues discussed in this thread are concerned? A lot of us posting on this thread spend many hours (at our own expense) offering constructive feedback on the functionality of Vectorworks. But this thread is about a fundamental change in pricing and licencing strategy, which in the medium to longer term is going to make Vectorworks substantially more expensive to use for most users, many of whom have invested decades in learning a package that has for a long time been placed at the more affordable end of the market, something that is significant for smaller-scale users.

The implication is that by not following the proper and righteous path, in year two we risk being bumped up to full subscription cost, so basically the price roughly doubled in one go. I wonder if they'd actually try that? I reckon probably not because many people's response would be simply to say no thanks, I'll stay with my last permitted perpetual licence, perhaps for at least 2 or 3 years. They'll be doing a weighing up of the VSS punishment premium (16% this time around) each year I reckon. If they make it too low, not enough people will switch. If they make it too high, people will just stall on their perpetual licence for X years. The ownership of a perpetual licence is the only negotiating lever (other than switching to other software) that users have. Once you don't have that, you really are captive.

Try reading the last few pages of this thread!

No, regular section viewports.

The last time I tried using it on a real project, I found that it also failed to hide other objects like extrudes & walls. That made it effectively unusable in section VPs. However: checking now (current version of VW2025), those objects appear to be ok. So it must have been fixed in an update at some point inbetween. However, it's still the case that there is a problem with door leafs.

I've just double checked in VW2025 update 7 (using the sample file I posted in the other thread) and door leaf cut planes still seem to be failing to hide.

Basically agree on all this; things are going in the right direction, and there are very competent people including those you mention, working on architectural tools, who understand what needs to happen and are good at communicating with users. It's just that the pace is so slow, which is not surprising when it appears there is a relatively small number of people leading some very substantial changes. That's why my complaint is that the company does not appear to be translating the increase in cost to users into increased human resources working to develop stuff and fix the enormous backlog of bugs and unfinished tools. I also understand that it might be a case of turning an oil tanker and we just have to be patient. But the years tick by.

Ah, I'm not talking about the fact you have to enter the design layer - I'm talking about the fact that certain objects fail to hide properly at all, as discussed here.

How so, not a bug?

A good example of a recent "so close" feature. It works, except it doesn't work in section viewports because certain common objects don't get hidden when they are supposed to be. 90% of my viewports are section viewports so I basically can't use it in viewports. The bugs are known but months have gone by without them being fixed. So frustrating.

The problem is that there do not seem to be enough resources made available for rapid improvement & fixing of all the basic things that users have been complaining about for years. Not things where maybe 5% of users would like this or that feature. Things where 100% of serious architecture users just want basic stuff to work properly. Somewhere earlier in this thread there was the suggestion that the move to subscription pricing was going to allow an acceleration of improvements & fixes. Well, some progress has been made and I am always careful to stress when writing things like this that I am aware that the people that are working on things, are likely working hard on them and doing the best that they can. But I don't yet see any evidence that the company has allocated sufficient extra resource to the development of Vectorworks to get through the large backlog of stuff that needs to be sorted out.

Agree with this. I consider myself pretty good at physical model making but just can't afford (in time) to use it for everyday design development. Recently I made a physical model for the first time in a while - the client loved it, and it reminded me that there are a few things that a real world model can do that a digital one can't. But it also reminded me how incredibly slow it is to make and modify them. Something that would take me a day to make (or adjust) I can do in 15 minutes on the computer. There's no push-pull tool for cardboard.

The main reason I use VW is because when I got my first "proper" job in something like 2001 it's what the practice I worked for used. When I became self employed, I carried on using it. That was partly because it's what I already knew, and there's a lot of inertia involved in changing to a different application. But it's also because at that time, the pricing seemed friendly to small-scale operations, compared to many of the alternatives. My next opportunity to switch to something else was when I decided to implement a 3d workflow. At that point I gave fairly serious consideration to Sketchup, because it's what I then used for quick 3d modelling. What stopped me from changing was that it really wasn't set up at that point to produce good 2d documentation, traditionally one of VW's strengths. I don't "disapprove" of VW the software. It has many strengths - it's quite highly customisable for example. It also has many many irritations and limitations but I know that switching to another software would probably just produce a different set of annoyances. The problem now is the pricing because all the signs are that it's going to go up considerably, compared to what it cost say 10 years ago, and once we are forced to switch to subscription it increases the anxiety about future cost increases (because there is no longer the buffer of knowing that stopping paying for VW would allow at least a couple of years for transition to something else, by staying on whatever release my last perpetual licence was for). Price is not the only factor that would pull me to an alternative software. If an alternative was 10 or 20% cheaper it would only be attractive if it was offering a non-subscription model. Up to a point I would accept some limitations in functionality of an open-source alternative, because I'd trade that for lower cost and greater reassurance about future direction. Of course, that would rely on an open source alternative having a big enough user base that I could be confident it did actually have a future. The reality is that VW is produced by a commercial organisation so of course their main target (as a company - I'm not in any way talking about individual employees) is to extract as much revenue as they can from their user base. They know that we are trapped to some extent by the amount of time and effort it would take to switch, and I guess they have decided that no serious competition is going to offer non-subscription ownership. The idea that subscription based licences are being pushed because it's in the user's interest is nonsense. Yes, perhaps it's a pricing model that works best for some. But if the pricing model was based on what users wanted rather than the company (which in itself wouldn't make commercial sense) then a perpetual-licence option could be run in parallel. The recent email is quite insulting, telling me "change is difficult" and saying something about being able to choose the best option for my team, at the same time transparently pricing out the more suitable option. I doubt that VW would really consider a "loyalty" discount because us long-term users are the ones they have the strongest hold on, the ones for whom moving to something else would be most difficult. What I'd welcome would be some kind of option that was aimed at smaller operators (which in my understanding has always been a significant part of VW's market) where a lower price was offered in exchange for certain limitations. For example: many smaller operators could do without things like project sharing, file referencing, maybe even things like IFC export. I'd have thought that it would be in VW's interest to stay attractive to smaller operators because that's a sector where one of the software's biggest downsides - basically "not being Revit" - doesn't matter so much. Exchange of information following formal BIM standards just isn't as important on smaller projects. Also, sole practitioners don't really need to worry about how many potential employees can use the software, because we don't employ others.

Same here.

There's also the question of what happens if the company goes bust or VW gets bought out by someone else. The only security you really have as a subscriber is the fact that there will be a large number of other angry ex-customers if the software for some reason stops being maintained, or access is cut off. There was recently the story of the Scandinavian home automation company who went bust, and got bought up by another company which told product users they would have to start paying a monthly charge if they wanted their light switches to keep working.

Are you suggesting that subscription services are becoming more widespread because it's what users want?

A consideration might be: what's the likelihood of a non-subscription alternative to VW appearing in the next 3 years? (Sadly the answer is probably "low")

Nothing would change for users struggling to articulate their questions, except that after reading their indecipherable post, instead of just scrolling on by, I or others might drop a link to the guidance into their thread, and if they follow it, it would increase their chances of getting useful answers.

I am often doing stuff with existing buildings. You always have to allow for a bit of error in survey drawings and so on. A common scenario is that the eaves of a new bit of monopitch roof is to be at a certain height and it is to rise up to meet an existing wall. The highest point on the roof pitch might be set to be a certain measurement below an existing window sill, say. In this case my setting out drawings give heights fixing the top & bottom of the roof pitch. I know what the pitch should end up as in theory, but it would be a mistake to set it out by defining the pitch angle, because any error might result in it meeting the wall where it clashes with the windowsill (or whatever). If I know roughly what the pitch should end up as, I can check that it doesn't matter if it ends up a few degrees more or less in real life. In these scenarios the actual exact length of the rafters is "computed" by the builders on site, by leaning them in place and cutting bits off with a saw.

Yes - agreed.

I don't agree - sometimes pitch is specified by support heights at each end and sometimes it's specified as an angle - it depends on the context. So we should be able to do it either way and to assist this we should be able to lock parameters as we wish. Sometimes I'd like to lock the start and rhe heights so that I can change the span of the beam in plan without worrying that they will change. Sometimes I might want to lock the start height and the pitch, sometimes the end height and the pitch.