Topic: 2008 - How's it hangin'?

[sinc]

I've spent the last couple of days using Civil-3D and Land Desktop 2008, and so far I have to say it has me really scared...

I've seen bugs, and I've seen a lot of things I hoped would be fixed that aren't, but so far I haven't seen anything really wrong.  Am I missing something?  Or could Autodesk just possibly have <gasp> gotten a good release out?

C3D in particular seems much faster and more stable.  I'm tempted to just jump in and roll it out, but I'm still really gun-shy after last year.  Land Desktop seemed OK at first glance, but as soon as we started really trying to use it, the interminable crashes became very infuriating.  But by the time we discovered the issues, we were already rolling with it, and just had to suffer until the SPs came out.  But so far, this release seems much better than 2007, and I really don't want to wait.

Who's been using 2008 out there, Land Desktop as well as Civil-3D?  What do you think?

[Jeff_M]

One thing I'm curious about in LDT. On the Adesk newsgroup there has been one report of a consistent crash when viewing cross sections:

Anyone else experience a fatal error when attempting to view cross sections
in Civil Design 2008?  Every machine, whether new or old, exhibits this
behavior and there appears to be no common denominator.  Every workstation,
every project, every time gets the dreaded "Fatal Error: Unhandled
c0000000dh Exception at 78144354h".

Since I don't have the CD module I cannot check this, have you used that function yet in 2008?

C3D2008 is a dream compared to 2007SP3. Yes, there are a few issues yet to be worked out but they are minor when compared with the improvements in stability. In fact, I have yet to crash 2008 under normal working conditions. I have seen crashes, but every one of them I can attribute to testing different coding options. I can consistently get a Fatal error by using either Lisp, VBA, or C#.NET, fortunately it only occurs after all drawings have been saved & closed.

[jpostlewait]

I'm still waiting impatiently for delivery.
My main concern about implementing 2008 revolves around Vault.
As far as I can recall none of the Beta testers had access to Vault 2008.
Pretty sure I read every thread in the Cannon Feedback forum and I don't think Vault was mentioned.
My preference would be to create my new Vault and migrate my existing projects into it and upgrade everyone.
Too much risk IMO to do with a fresh product.
If you are not running Vault, from everything I have heard, I'd start rolling it out on Monday.
And the Bug in creating Network Deployment sites just P*sses me off.
I want to be the VP of Quality Control at Autodesk instead of the chimp who has that title now.
Of course I wouldn't last long but it might be fun for a few minutes.

[Cannon]

As far as I can recall none of the Beta testers had access to Vault 2008.

Cough.

You just never asked. And what you had in B3 was the final Beta of Vault 2008, but few people installed it.

[dgreble]

Received disk from reseller on Thursday and disk from autodesk on Friday.  Has been installed since Thursday and have hit a bump in the road with creating sheets.  we are working with autodesk to fix problem and to figure out if it is ours or 2008.  We are not using vault.  We immediately threw an 07 project into 08 and started creating sheets.  08 does seem faster and more stable in general.  i don't think we will look back from this point and hopefully there are smooth seas ahead.  shift - mbutton for snaps is different and is driving me crazy. 

[Mark]

I'm still waiting impatiently for delivery.
My main concern about implementing 2008 revolves around Vault.
As far as I can recall none of the Beta testers had access to Vault 2008.
Pretty sure I read every thread in the Cannon Feedback forum and I don't think Vault was mentioned.
My preference would be to create my new Vault and migrate my existing projects into it and upgrade everyone.
Too much risk IMO to do with a fresh product.
If you are not running Vault, from everything I have heard, I'd start rolling it out on Monday.
And the Bug in creating Network Deployment sites just P*sses me off.
I want to be the VP of Quality Control at Autodesk instead of the chimp who has that title now.
Of course I wouldn't last long but it might be fun for a few minutes.

Maybe it's just me but I don't see C3D as a "fresh product", more like on-going beta testing. Don't get me wrong, so far I like C3D but it still evolving. What are some of the major changes to C3D in 2008? Sorry I haven't had time to look it up.

Waiting for my disks to show-up... *sigh*

[jpostlewait]

Intersting remark made by the guy that used to be the head of our IS group.
" It's all Beta"
I think at least as far as I am concerned is that the development team really worked on performance and stability.
They learned last year you can't put a product out for general use that blows up.
They learned that and made a MAJOR fix with SP3 of 2007.
Guy on a different thread said just think of this as C3D 2005 Service Pack 11.
All softwares evolve.
Built a XP box lately with original XP and run the updates?
I'm actually pretty excited to see how well it drives.

[sinc]

I got C3D 2008 to crash.  I used LAYISO to isolate some linework, and then tried to create a parcel from it.  Things got VERY strange.

Haven't had enough time to do rigorous testing on it, but my initial suspect is that it has something to do with the change to LAYISO.  Now, instead of turning the other layers OFF, it locks the other layers.  This causes them to be displayed dimly, with half-highlighting.  I don't think I really like this, because a primary reason for using LAYISO is to make sure my OSNAP is going to the right object, and it's still possible to OSNAP to objects on locked layers.

Anyway, my initial suspect is that something about having most of my layers locked caused an issue.  I've had other C3D commands complain when I try to run them after doing a LAYISO, because they try to access data on a locked layer (not sure which one).  But when I tried to create parcels, I got very stange behavior.  It was supposed to be four parcels, and I got labels for four parcels, but they all appeared outside of the site and superimposed on top of each other, and three of them had the same areas.  And only two parcels showed up in Toolspace.  I finally decided C3D was in a bad state and tried to shut it down, but it crashed instead.

I'm not sure this problem had anything to do with locked layers, but that's my initial guess.

[Mark]

So are the points any better? Does the program freeze when you select points, mover points, etc.?

[sinc]

Well, I didn't have any issues with 2007 freezing while selecting points, and I still don't.  But you probably won't see that problem in 2008.

I suspect the issue you were seeing is caused by a difference in hardware.  Pre-2008, as you selected (or mouse-overed) points, the entire point group that the point belongs to would highlight.  This probably hit slower machines pretty hard, but I haven't noticed it with my hardware.  However, Autodesk changed the behavior, so Point Groups no longer highlight.  So if you liked this behavior, too bad.  But on the plus side, they fixed the "stuck highlighting" problem, so you don't have to regen in order to get rid of the highlighting after deselecting points.

Something that has me completely puzzled is why they got rid of Point Group Layers.  I didn't like them all the time, but they were useful for some things.  What I really wanted them to do is make the Point Group Layer an optional override, so that you could optionally use the Point Group Layer to override Point display.  But they didn't - they completely removed what was a useful feature in some situations.  This means you will probably have to do at least some measure of edits to your template file, to account for the new behavior.

[Mark]

Well, I didn't have any issues with 2007 freezing while selecting points, and I still don't.  But you probably won't see that problem in 2008.

I suspect the issue you were seeing is caused by a difference in hardware.  Pre-2008, as you selected (or mouse-overed) points, the entire point group that the point belongs to would highlight.  This probably hit slower machines pretty hard, but I haven't noticed it with my hardware.  However, Autodesk changed the behavior, so Point Groups no longer highlight.  So if you liked this behavior, too bad.  But on the plus side, they fixed the "stuck highlighting" problem, so you don't have to regen in order to get rid of the highlighting after deselecting points.

Dang sinc what do you have for hardware! I've got a dual xeon 3.0 with 2gb of ram an nvidia quadro w/256mb of ram and scsi disks! I'm glad they fixed the highlighting problem, that drives me absolutely batty.

Something that has me completely puzzled is why they got rid of Point Group Layers.

As in this point group layer?

[Jeff_M]

Yep, that's the one, Mark.

[sinc]

Dang sinc what do you have for hardware! I've got a dual xeon 3.0 with 2gb of ram an nvidia quadro w/256mb of ram and scsi disks! I'm glad they fixed the highlighting problem, that drives me absolutely batty.

That sounds like some of the Dell workstations (Precision 690, I think) that we have.

From what I've seen, I'm underwhelmed with their performance.  It could have something to do with the fact that those Xeons are built for "ultimate reliability", which means they use things like ECC memory.  That adds reliability at a hit to performance.  Personally, I've never had noticeable reliability problems with non-ECC memory, so I don't see much point in taking the performance hit.

I'm also not too impressed with the motherboards that Dell typically sells.  That might have even more to do with it.  I think we have a 3.2 and a 3.4 GHz single-processor Xeons from Dell that perform WAY worse than our newest machines.  And of course, Autocad (at least pre-2008) doesn't know how to use dual-processors, so that doesn't provide much advantage.

Anyway, the machines I've been building lately are custom-built, using E6700 Core 2 Duo chips and good motherboards.  GFX have been the nVidia Quadro FX1500 for the last two machines, and of course the WD Raptor RAID striping array for the primary drive.  Memory has been standard PC2-6400, 2GB, although I'm pushing to get them upgraded to 3GB as we go into the summer and have more money coming in.

But I've also been getting pretty decent performance on my computer at home, with only an Athlon64 4000+ and Quadro FX700, plus 3GB PC3200 RAM.  But again, I have a good motherboard.  So it's possible that the big performance hit on those Dell Xeon workstations (if that's what you have) is mostly because of the MOBO.

[sinc]

ACK!!!  Line/Curve labels in Land Desktop 2008 get all the leading zeros truncated!

I get delta angles and bearings that look like N5°8'3"E, instead of N05°08'03"E!  YUCK!   :realmad:

Thanks, Autodesk.

OTOH, C3D 2008 seems to be far better than 2007 SP3...

[sinc]

Here's a minor one:

Autocad 2008 does not seem to allow any keyboard shortcuts to be assigned to CTRL+SHIFT+Z.  I have no idea why.  It used to be allowed pre-2008, and I haven't yet found any other keystroke combinations that are "not allowed", so I don't know why they disabled CTRL+SHIFT+Z.

I've had "Label Line by Points" in Land Desktop assigned to that keystroke combination since the 2006 version.  Guess I have to get used to a different keystroke combination for it now.