Intermittent Bugs in V13 and especially V14
Comments
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You say that you have to do a regen. Why? Is the new entity invisible? Are you perhaps referring to zooming out on infinite lines?0
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In order to verify if a problem is related to one of the hundreds of settings that happen to exist in the dwg-world, our support analysts may indeed ask to check if the problem goes away when using only default settings, as contained in a newly created user profile. They do this in order to avoid wasting your time by asking repeatedly if modifying setting a, setting b, ..., setting xyz, etc. influences the problem.
... I think creating a new user profile is and unacceptable solution. I spent a lot of time customizing my toolbars for efficient work, and it's a real pain to re-create that. Bricsys support has yet to explain to me how the user profile gets "corrupted". The bugs are definitely not a response to customizing a toolbar. I've gone for weeks at a time without doing any customization and the bugs still appear.
If the problem goes away when using default settings, and returns later on after using the program for a while, it does not mean that the user profile gets "corrupted", it indicates that the setting that triggers the problem was modified. Which is why we have offered to investigate the difference between your user profiles (in reply to SR 44017) so we can help you.
One year ago you indeed reported a similar issue in SR39610, in August you asked to close it as the issue no longer occurred . Please reopen the SR or file a new one if the problem reoccurs.The most prevalent bug is a failure of BricsCAD to refresh the screen after an operation. For me, it happens most frequently when I am drawing infinite lines or offsetting an infinite line. I have to do a REGEN after each operation. REDRAW does not work. I like using 100% (width and height) crosshairs, but had to change to 30%, because it aggravates the problem.
I failed to find a mention of this issue in your support requests. As always, if you file a support request we will be glad to investigate what could cause this issue, if you do, please attach a drawing with which the problem is known to have occurred.Object selection has also become a frequent problem under V14. The program becomes completely unresponsive for minutes at a time. It is not just a failure to recognize the position of the cursor or a mouse click. Selection boxes (left to right, or right to left) stop working too Then after a few minutes of utter frustration, selection will start working again. I've found sometimes that ESCAPE key multiple times helps.
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You say that you have to do a regen. Why? Is the new entity invisible? Are you perhaps referring to zooming out on infinite lines?
I don't think I can recall having a problem seeing an entity immediately after I drew it. But infinite lines I drew on the same face only a few steps beforehand disappear when I draw an additional line, or pan the view with REAL TIME PAN. That forces me to repeatedly invoke the REGEN command. Polygons I drew on the same face also disappear when I pan left, right, up or down.0 -
@Hans De Backer
......If the problem goes away when using default settings, and returns later on after using the program for a while, it does not mean that the user profile gets "corrupted", it indicates that the setting that triggers the problem was modified. .......
.....One year ago you indeed reported a similar issue in SR39610, in August you asked to close it as the issue no longer occurred . Please reopen the SR or file a new one if the problem reoccurs....
....I failed to find a mention of this issue in your support requests. As always, if you file a support request we will be glad to investigate what could cause this issue, if you do, please attach a drawing with which the problem is known to have occurred.
Hans,
You're assuming I'm changing something in the settings dialog, which then causes a problem. But these problems crop up even when I have not made a change in the settings dialog. In my day to day work, I just use the tools in the toolbars, and respond to the prompts in the command bar. It's been very rare when I manually open the settings dialog to change anything. About the only time I see the settings dialog is when I when I shift -right click and change the entity snap settings. The only tools I invoke from the command line are UCS, UCSICON, and rarely, MIRRTEXT.
I can't get to my list of service requests while I am writing this note... You're probably right. I may not have opened SR's unique to these problems (failure of the screen to update, intermittent entity selection , cross-hair problem). But I know I had discussions with support about those issues - probably within other SR's I opened for V13. Don't get me wrong. I think the staff has been very good about addressing my requests. But not every SR was resolved. Before V14 was released, I reported a couple issues with V13, which were acknowledged as genuine. I was promised fixes. But the fixes didn't make it into V13, and have yet to appear in V14. One is the way BricsCAD drops the tool you selected when you change the entity snap settings. I never had this issue with Autocad. I've learned to re-invoke the command after each entity snap setting.
I asked you to close some SR's because the problem proved to be a lack of understanding on my part. Other SR's I asked you to close because you didn't see the problem on your systems, or because I wasn't able to reliably replicate the issue here. That doesn't mean I was imagining the problem. Just the other day I had to bail out of a drawing unsaved, because "SAVE" kept generating errors. I had to shut down, and lost my work. I never replicated the problem.
I find the program very useful, and support generally very good. But I'm getting increasingly frustrated with these entity selection issues, screen regeneration problems, print driver problems, etc. My bosses expect me to churn out drawings quickly. I apologize if it seems sometimes as if I am a chronic complainer.0 -
Jim,
as you probably are aware, my intent is far from making you look a chronic complainer, but rather to get informed, in the most efficient way so neither you nor we lose precious time, about existing issues so we can address them: I don't need convincing that users have better things to do than sending in reports about non-existing problems.
Nor do I want to make it look as if you are modifying settings while denying to have done so: settings often (rightfully) change as a side effect of using certain command options. The only thing that matters in such case, is finding out which one is the related setting: once that has been established it will most probably become straightforward to find out 1. what has triggered the change 2. why this change triggers a problem.
Your feedback sounds true and straight from the heart, which I much appreciate, we will do the best we can to solve these issues.
Hans0 -
...but please do file support requests for issues that were not yet reported.0
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Hans,I've been experiencing some health problems and haven't been able to spend as much time at my computer as I usually do. And what time I am at my computer, I have to hurry my drawings along to keep management happy. So it may be a week or more before I post those other support requests.Jim C.0
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I should mention that I have also been having display issues. Often some of a deleted object will linger, or if I turn off a layer, parts will linger. These things go away when I do a redraw. Before, I realized what was happening, I kept trying to delete those stray objects.
I should also mention that I have some display issues when I am in 3D mode, but in that case, my computer's performance slows to a crawl. So, I may just not have a good video processor on the laptop that I use for the current version of BricsCAD. I did not have a problem working in a shaded 3D display in an older version of BricsCAD.
But, even in a purely 2D drawing, I tend to lock BricsCAD up every other day or so. If I could reproduce the event, I would contact support.
-Joe0 -
Reading my posts here would give someone the impression the program is unusable. I should say it is a very good program. I get a lot of work done with it. I'm just frustrated when a bug occurs and I can't replicate it.
The support staff wants me to revert to the default.cui file or user profile *.arg to troubleshoot intermittent bugs. The reason I resist that is because I have too many customizations to lose. All my toolbar customizations are in the default.cui file. When we installed BricsCAD we didn't know we should set up a secondary *.cui to hold customizations. And at this stage in the game, I don't know how to separate the customizations from the default.cui.
The profile file (*.arg) is even more of a mystery to me. I thought the purpose of the *.arg file is to hold a list of which toolbars are active, and where they are positioned in the window. But whenever I lose toolbars, I have to repositione them manually. .
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@Jim,
A CUI can be edited in a text editor, and the format is very apparent. I do a fair amount of manual editing to my custom CUI file because the built-in editor has a few rough spots. You should be able to create a new partial CUI file and set up dummy toolbar with single dummy button, then manually move your toolbars from the default file to the new file. Tedious, but it does work. I probably don't need to say this, but be sure you make copies of the original files so you can revert it things go wrong. You will need to copy both the macros and the toolbars. In my custom CUI I use copies of Bricscad macros with modified UIDs. All my macros start 'E1_' or 'E2_'.0
