Joining the Outlaws

I still use v17 — but I'm not an outlaw, just old. I bought v25 because of the huge discount. I think that entitles me to use any version up to 26. I'll probably keep using 17 till they cart me away. No new tricks for me.

I'm staying on v14 as long as I can continue to make it work. And I will jump ship from BricsCAD for the same motivations that took me from AutoCAD. Though my fear is that Autodesk's policies will be universal in the CAD industry.

My history is that I said to the small company where I worked, that they should not upgrade the AutoCAD v12 seat they had at the time. By that time, upgrades to new releases of AutoCAD were not actually earning their upgrade fee with new features at each increment. And that they had turned to an upgrade policy where the fee was high enough, that skipping releases didn't have any financial advantage. This was essentially a subscription model, even if you didn't officially switch over to their newly created subscription plan. This certainly irritated the people like me, and prompted them to jumped ship from AutoCAD to BricsCAD.

When AutoCAD v12 had become outdated enough that we should upgrade at that first company, I suggested BricsCAD, even though it was somewhat buggy at the time. It was a much smarter investment than AutoCAD's unofficial subscription policy. We did purchase BricsCAD, and would upgrade to BricsCAD v14 Pro eventually. Initially, our failure to upgrade beyond that was because of financial reasons. Both because of the company barely existing, and because BricsCAD was rightly increasing its costs as it added new features. But, eventually my reasoning changed. The motivation to jump-ship from AutoCAD was Autodesk's licensing model. But that motivation was now essentially gone as BricsCAD adopted the same policies.

Concerning "Illegal", I hate that the pirate industry gets to serve a legitimate role when providing ways for legitimate users of older versions to continue to use their software.

-Joe

1. Regarding the World War II analogy - hard times create strong people, strong people create good times, good times create weak people, weak people create hard times, and so on. I'll let everyone decide for themselves what period we're in now.
2. When Autodesk made Autocad expensive and eventually moved to a subscription model, alternatives started to appear and people moved to them. If Bricsad goes the way of Autodesk, I imagine people will make the switch again to these other alternatives and new ones will appear as well.

Well put. When Hexagon bought them out definitely had a bad feeling. I'm not having the issues (yet) that some of you encountered but that may be that I employ a simple old school work flow that doesn't rely on all the bells and whistles.

Still can anyone come up with a case where a big company takes over the lesser and it's hands down a better product in the end? You really think Netflix buying out WB is going to fix quality of entertainment? Different field but dynamics the same - price increase. Sorry I'm ranting again.

”complaints of unreliability and incomplete development seem to have increased”.

Observed this too.

Same grievances, when they implement something new there’s always problems, but in many cases they just seem to get abandoned.

This UI project, they claim it’ll take a decade to complete. What planet are they on? A UI for an app of this size shouldn’t take more than 1.5 years. They started this in 2022, 4 years and it’s still an unfinished mess.

Currently V26.2 RefEdit is Broken.

They updated the theme on DWGPROPS, now can’t double click the Value for the dialogue box to open up to enter the value and OK button doesn’t respond to the Enter Key.

Layers panel, OMG what a clusterFXXX, constantly reorders itself switching between model space and paper space.

BIM Sections (Volumes) incredibly SLOW, and horrendously difficult to resize. A BIM Sections Layer is created but the Section stays on the current layer. Again, performance, my gosh today with 3 section boxes in model space, selecting one section and trying to change the drop down for clip display on to off, not responding for about 15 seconds.

The ViewCube, again unfinished, despite repeated SRs to modify it. I suggested they remove the chair inside, make it solid and put text on each face. The transparency and that chair make notoriously incredibly difficult to determine what face is what, and where I am in 3D space. It displays text of the face when a face is clicked, and that’s expected but in any other position, too hard determine orientation.

IFC Import, why does it assume user wants multi nested blocks created costing valuable time in import. Then cos time exploding nested upon nested blocks. We can’t do anything with blocks, none of the BIM data is exposed and we cannot slice blocks. Just import directly as solids, please there’s nothing in then IFC import dialogue providing an option to create blocks, so why assume we want that and why trick the user by hiding this output?

Stability, literally every dwg session crashes, every dwg file has a crash report in the folder. Today, copy layout and past new name in command line…crashed and closed.

There’s just so so many issues, its’s like ‘proof of concept stage software’ in many cases.

BOM is excruciatingly slow, Mechanical Browser so slow. An external PostgreSQL database should have been considered. Now i’m suspicious of DWG, probably it just isn’t suited to contain and manage BIM data of the 21st century, it’s certainly not capable of parametric geometry and relationships, probably reason why Bricsys keeps avoiding adding true parametric 3D part capabilities.

The Geometry Kernel, likewise is no doubt impeding performance too, after all its’ geometry from the 1970’s. For BIM, Parametric geometry, ‘Implicit Modelling’ is the next generation high performance geometry, max GPU utilisation resulting in outstanding frame rates. NTop and Altair Aspire have Implicit Modelling and its nit just for additive manufacturing of lattices. Check out the realtime performance and the 100% parametric capability of these models, and super tiny file sizes too, less than 1MB:

https://tristanantonsen.com/posts/nTop-Models/

Graphics Engine in both MS & PS, shaded viewport a bit of tansparency a few lines with a 0.5-1.0mm line weight, bogs down rapidly. Octave should look at aqcuiring the RedWAY3D SDK and graphics engine off Tech Soft 3D. Those guys are seriously dragging the chain and are in denial. I showed them their demo engine running at 1 FPS and they responded as if that’s expected and that with their help they can improve it and showed me one of theirs doing 10 FPS, like I expect 100+ FPS with the model they demoed. Essentially, eshitification, showcasing a product with horrific performance and attempting to sell it as a diamond, customers are just going to laugh at them.

All in all, agree with Tom’s post. Not liking the current state of this and have doubts about the future too.

Looking out for ZWSofts up and coming ZWBIM, will see how reactive the Chinese are and how hungry they are to satisfy users expectations.

So the salmon returning was really just a bait and switch scheme?

Of course, with AI data centers you're going to need a lot more electricity. My electric bill has more than doubled in the past year. A lot of data centers here, driving up demand and electric rates.

Yes, that's what I hear. And they built it for a fraction of the cost of ours. And I think electricity is much cheaper in China. And I think they now have wind turbines that generate 20 megawatts each.

The US government just paid a company a billion dollars to abandon a wind farm they were building in New York. The Department of War banned offshore wind turbines because their radar can't tell the difference between a wind turbine and an enemy aircraft. They thought it was a good idea to publicize that.

Totally agree with the UI issue, Layers Panel disaster and the way to many crashes working in 3D.

whent back to V25.

as of now I'm using both V24 and V25 because of a third party add in that run only on V24.

sriously considering to stay only with V24 and be done with it…

I agree, every time I close bricscad a crash report is created, unstable and buggy for 3d mechanical and bim work.

I'm going to use v24 for now but does make me question why am I paying yearly maintenance. Stability is more important than new features in my opinion.

Yes.