V8
What improvements/additions can we lookforward to with V8?
Comments
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I am anxiously awaiting the ability to program in VBA. (I know the Pro version is advertised as having VBA, but it is not AutoCAD compatable, so its usefulness is greatly diminished)I keep saying we will have to abandon BricsCAD and buy regular AutoCAD because of the lack of AutoCAD compatable VBA. But everytime we commit to it, something with the company's finances comes up to prevent this.Another problem that is showing itself more and more is BricsCAD's inability to do Tables. When our customer sends us a file with tables on them, they don't appear at all, so we don't even know they are missing.Joe Dunfee
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We're about in the same situatiuon money-wise.A few years ago I was lucky to convince mysuperiors to purchase Bricscad. Now that revenues are up, I'm pushing for a 3D solution -SolidWorks, Solidedge, Inventor and etc. Inventor might be most appealing since it hasAcad bundled with it - but again Autodesk hasthat silly retirement thing going on. Solidworkshas Intellicad so that may be the way to go.
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Tim, the IntelliCAD included with Solidworks is a stripped down version. I don't know if it will display ACIS solids, which may be important if you are doing solid modeling.By the way, Alibre has some low-cost parametrics. Not all the features as Solidworks, but the issue is which program has the features you want.Joe Dunfee
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In answer to the initial question of this thread, some highlights:The V8 User Interface is thoroughly revamped:* a resizable dockable properties bar is added* all toolbar icons are redesigned* a new Drawing Explorer with extended functionality is added(integrated Xref manager, Raster image manager, Block manager)* new System Variables dialog is added* Menus and toolbars are entirely redesigned and support the Acad .cui (xml) file format.The key difference between V7 and V8 sits under the hood:the old OpenDwg libraries are entirely replaced by the new DwgDirect libraries:* 2007 is used as the V8 native internal file format.* all string processing is Unicode-based like in AutoCad 2007* the existing COM API is replaced by a new, fully AutoCad compatible COM API.* a new Lisp engine has been built in, offering stunning performance improvement, and support for the VLR, VLX and VLAX functions was added.* the ARX API is already partially supported and will be further extended in the coming year.
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It all sounds deeply sexy. When's it due for release, and will it be an affordable update for us long-term Bricscad users? And despite all the changes for AutoCAD compatability, will it still work well with Architecturals? And will Architecturals have a matching interface re-vamp? And will there be any compatibility issues with drawings made using earlier versions?Aren't I nosey...!
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With the new COM will we lose the intellicad method of defining points. I find it much easier than Acad's method of using an array.
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Any word on "tables"?
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I've just looked at IntelliCAD's web site, and at their latest news release (March 1) announces version 6.3. Unfortunately, there is no mention of tables among the new features. Also missing is any mention of the VBA being AutoCAD compatable.They continue to omit these kinds of limitations, but tout their ability to "read and write 2007" DWG files. I really think the way they describe their compatability is misleading.Joe Dunfee
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We use version 7.1.16. We have no difficulties working with the dwg's our clients send us. ML.
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I also have very little trouble with dwg compatability. Lisp was the original feature to sway me to try Icad and have never been disappointed, not sure about VBA as I don't use it.I often wonder about how others use their Icad and also why it hasn't beaten Acad to death by now, but I suspect VBA and lisp are of lesser interest to very many users & potential users.Rather than "hiding something", features which are not even in Acad Lite are probably secondary for purposes of promoting basic Icad. I would expect to have to search deeper for users' experiences etc for performance of such "extras", indeed for peoples' experience of real-world performance of the program.
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The incident that irritated me was when we discovered that drawings from one particular customer was missing stuff. This was in a version that BricsCad was supposed to be able to read and write... but there was a "got-chya".Some entities are not supported, and simply do not show up on the drawing. If your customer only uses suppoted entities, then you are OK. In our case, we eventually determined that tables were the missing items. So, now we've had to abandon Bricscad because we can't trust the drawings it opens. Is it missing stuff or not?The next part for us, is incompatability regarding programming or lack of documentation for programming Bricscad. We will eventually be ready to fund a few seats of AutoCAD. But it is a race... what will happen first? Our funding for AutoCAD, or BricsCad's updates?Joe Dunfee
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Well it does seem pretty hard to find out if there is anything which will not translate with Autocad.There used to be a list of supported entities and what happened with unsupported entities, when Icad was produced by Visio, but I can't find it or its successor list now.While I have not been troubled, disappearing entities without warning would be pretty annoying. Perhaps expensive, even dangerous.
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Ideally, I would love for them to both list unsupported entities. But, in addition, it would be wonderful if, when opening a drawing, that any unsupported entities would actually be listed. Perhaps a bit of marketing could be added..."Warning; the DWG you have opened was created by a program that does not support the Open DWG alliance, and has been found to contain the following violations; (these entities will be preserved) 2 Tables (proxy graphic not available) 3 Acis Solids(Proxy graphic available)etc."Joe Dunfee
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There are, or were entities such as multilines which display in Icad and some are editable to some extent.These could prompt a different warning I guess, but perhaps more an explanation rather than a warning because, other than tables I don't know of translated entities which cause a major impediment at least for my purposes.
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Please note that current alpha will display 'table' entities. You cannot (yet) create them or edit the cell content but you can do basic editing such as move, copy, delete, change layer. The Properties Bar indicates it as a 'table' and even allows you to modify things as Table width, Table height.
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I think Joe made a very important suggestion here. More than once I am warned about “This drawing contains one or more . . . ” and in some cases I am forced to investigate the nature of these entities, to make sure I am not overlooking something vital. I recently got a DWG that contained closed splines. I needed them. Since VBA (I run still v6) supports splines as entities, I was able to construct a routine that converted the closed splines to closed polylines, deleting the original splines from the drawing. That was sweet. What wasn’t that sweet was the process of determining what this DWG was hiding for me. As a native BricsCAD user, I did not even know splines existed as entity types (as I am unaware of the nature of tables . . .). That is why I support the suggestion of BricsCAD (optionally) creating a list of the unsupported entities that the opened drawing contains. Am I wrong to think it won’t be that difficult to incorporate? In v8?
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That was silly, writing: "I did not even know splines existed as entity types"I meant to say: "I did not even know closed splines existed as entity types"
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There is a distinction between entities that should not be drawn, and entities that are not drawn because of a bug or partial implementation.The display of proxy entities is controlled with the PROXYSHOW system variable.The boundingbox of proxy entities is shown if PROXYSHOW is set to 2.Depending on the proxy it is possible to see a more complete display of proxy entities when PROXYSHOW=1. In V7 this full display mechanism is informative rather than reliable on because the implementation is not complete, but the boundingbox display is available.Recent entities such as helix and table are treated as a proxy so their boundingbox should be visible.Then, hatches with a density that is higher than MaxHatch are not shown. That is by design.Inserts that use an empty block definition are not shown.Entities have a property that can make them invisible.Finally, there are bugs. Splines are displayed with V7, also when they are closed. If a spline cannot be viewed it means the program has a problem with this specific spline.The normal procedure then is that we look at this spline entity and fix the mechanism. We have had cases where recovery of the drawing fixed splines that were misrepresented.At the moment we are preparing V8 which has a display mechanism that is not related to the mechanism in v7Recent entities like tables and helixes, which are still proxies in v7, will become normal entities in v8.The mechanism for displaying a stored view of proxies (PROXYSHOW is 1) is fully implemented in v8.Very likely, any display problem of splines that remains after recovery in v7 will be eliminated in V8.kind regards,Alexander Van Heuverzwyn,Bricsys
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Thanks, Alexander, for your long explanation. I thought my example of the closed splines was well chosen, because I assumed that the fact that they were not drawn was caused by what you call “partial implementation”. As you write it was a bug that has been (long) resolved. My misinterpretation does, I think, illustrate the lack of understanding I experience the moment I read the message “This drawing contains one or more . . . ”Joe suggested that, when opening a drawing, any unsupported entities would actually be listed. That suggestion I simply want to support. Kind regards, Gerrit
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Alexander, I also thank you for the detailed response.It is often difficult to find this sort of information about a company's program. It is rare amont software vendors, but we need to know this stuff in order to really use a program well. Bricsys has consistantly shown itself to perform well in this regard, even above other Intellicad vendors.Joe Dunfee
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That's very true.
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I knew I had read somewhere that the VBA in Bricscad was compatable with AutoCAD. The web page description is vague about this, but the Bricscad help file clearly states it is compatable (though that is incorrect). The subject is "Programming in BricsCad." I will try to format the table here;=====AutoCAD programming interface BricsCad support Visual Basic Applications (VBA) Supported, depending on your version of BricsCad =====Joe Dunfee
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Joe,That text also appears in my v6 help file. In my understanding, this text does not claim compatibility. But I’ve heard the claim in relation to the new v8.VBA is supported by IntelliCad/BricsCad and very decently, I would say. Limitations are severe on some areas (for instance the interface of BricsCad). And naturally the partial implementation of the different objects imposes identical limitations in VBA. Compatibility is something else: Routines programmed in BricsCad cannot be used in Autocad, as similar objects are differently referenced. For instance a polyline is an object referenced in BricsCad as ‘IntelliCAD.Polyline’, in AutoCad as ‘AutoCAD.AcadPolyline’. Running routines created for the one, gives an error (unrecognised object) in the other. To write compatible code, a programmer has, at the moment, to write two different versions of his routine. In my understanding of the claim made for the v8 of Bricscad, Bricscad will be able to recognise the ‘AutoCAD.AcadPolyline’ reference as a valid reference to a Polyline object (and so on). Then BricsCad is able to process VBA routines written for Autocad. This is probably a big step forward for the non-professional programmer like me. I think professional developers will be for a while face the limitations of the IntelliCad/BricsCad implementations of VBA.Hope that was useful, Gerrit
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Gerrit, Transfering code between the two is more than just doing a search-and-replace. The structure of point coordinates are different. I am a relative novice in VBA, so learning it the IntelliCAD way from scratch should not have been an issue (i.e. I don't have to unlearn anything) But there is a lack of books and articles to help teach me.I have been doing a lot more work in VBA over the last month or so. I am hoping that this will help me to mentally translate the reference materials I have about AutoCAD VBA into the IntelliCad version. But for now, I am just sitting on the project, anticipating the next version of IntelliCAD.Joe Dunfee
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