AC 30 very unstable?

[runxel]

Hi folks, just a quick survey:

Does other people experience a high amount of crashes with AC 30 as well? 

I wonder if its because I'm still on Sequioa or what else is contributing here. But it even happens in empty files, so corrupt .pln can be ruled out.

For GS just two recent ones to check (I stopped writing them numbers down, it's just too frequent):

AC30-2026-10-22-16-09-15-3638

AC30-2026-10-25-14-08-10-1328

[Patrick M]

TBH, archicad and crashes have just become such a routine thing for YEARS now... I don't know that I would notice.
It's kind of like I've been living on a flood plain, and when I see others comment "seems like its getting kind of wet around here, no?"

...
I'm not diving into AC30 in any kind of hurry after our massive losses in the move to AC29; but keep us posted if you hear anything from support on these bugs... same (******) reply I get when I post about crashes on here: "you DID send this to your local reseller/support/etc., right?"

[runxel]

Thanks for your view, Patrick.

I don't know, I honestly never had these issues, not even in the Betas before 30. Yeah, sometimes something happens and then you get a crash. But rarely so!

Performance issues, also yes, but frequent crashes like now? No no, that's a new one for me.

Hehe, I know, the "send it to support" trope is well established by now, but honestly, there isn't even anything I could send them, since it happens in empty files too. I hit a shortcut, like in the last bug number from my post, where I wanted to make a copy: Beachball, then crash.

All of these crashes are not replicable, so that might be the catch. Next time I make a copy everything works fine and I can not make it crash. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Patrick M]

I wonder if someone like @James B could do some sleuthing on the bug ID's given...

[James B]

@runxel 

Thanks for the crash id's. I was already starting to check, so far I don't understand immediately from the call stack. Will have to follow up with the team tomorrow.

[runxel]

Thank you so much. I asked Claude by giving the Apple crash log.

So take this with a grain of salt form the AI:

The crash is a null/garbage-pointer dereference in Graphisoft’s own menu code, triggered by a keyboard shortcut.

• Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV), a read from invalid address 0x00004e2e401025c8.
• Crashing frame: -[DGMenuController menu:updateItemImage:atIndex:] + 108 in DG.framework, Graphisoft’s UI toolkit.
• How it got there: The call chain starts at NSWindow keyDown: and goes through performKeyEquivalent:, _checkMenuTreeForKeyEvent and NSMenu _populateFromDelegate.... So you pressed a key combination, and macOS was checking whether it matched a menu shortcut. To do that, AppKit repopulated a menu via its delegate, which is DGMenuController. While updating a menu item’s icon, the code dereferenced a bad pointer.
• The pointer itself: In register x8, the address is 0x00004e2e40102530, while x0 holds 0x0000600016f82530. The low bits match, but the high bits differ. That looks like a corrupted or tagged pointer, typical of a use-after-free or a stale NSMenuItem reference. The faulting address is 0x98 bytes past it, a struct field read on a dangling object.

[runxel]

This is something that also constantly happened during the Beta. I'd press a keyboard shortcut and AC would be like:

[James B]

We did fix many bugs and crashes from the Beta in the final version, so I need to check what’s happening in this situation. I’ll get back to you @runxel 

[Patrick M]

always appreciate your help sorting all this stuff out for us James!

[Bricklyne Clarence]

I always used to think that the old rule of thumb was to never use a new version of archicad on any major projects until about the 4th or 5th hotfix.

Or at least, never upgrade your projects to the new version until those versions of the hotfix, which is around the time they've sorted out the stability issues and which usually tends to be sometime early in the new year.

Ever since they switched to yearly releases with shortened beta-testing periods, it's become routine for Graphisoft to release unstable and still buggy new releases - even when they know it still has issues. They've even een forthright about it this time with the new version of MacOS known and expected to not play nice with version 30 until they sort the issues sometime later this year.

I'm not saying that that's what's happening in your case, but I just don't have the faith I used to in GS a long time ago, to release stable reliable products.

You're probably going to get a lot of responses about how the issue seems to be unique to you, and how those errors can't seem to be replicated on their end (even though it becomes obvious that it's not just you who's experiencing them), right up until the issues will seem to magically sort themselves out at some point after a hotfix.

All of which will confirm that it wasn't just you or your machine that was the problem, but rather it was on their end.

It's also a big reason why a lot of people have resorted to not upgrading to new versions at all, and instead choosing to stick to two or 3 versions behind the latest release (....aside from the subscription licensing issues and the lack of new features justifying jumping into new versions).

Which of course we know now they're trying to undo by forcing everyone onto Subscription-only licensing which means whether you want it or not you'll have to be upgrading to the new versions (buggy and all) whenever they release them.

[AllanP]

I thought the move to subscription meant that they would go back to releasing stable versions when the product was ready, rather than releasing on financial year cycles and only having every 2nd version stable, or waiting for 3 or 4 hotfixes before the version was stable.

[Lingwisyer]

Maybe that will be what will happen from now on as it is now subscription only from here on out.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

---

@AllanP wrote:

I thought the move to subscription meant that they would go back to releasing stable versions when the product was ready, rather than releasing on financial year cycles and only having every 2nd version stable, or waiting for 3 or 4 hotfixes before the version was stable.

---

I mean,...that's the theory.

The problem is, the theory doesn't hold if Graphisoft no longer have any accountability, or expectation to produce a high quality product - .....which a subscription licensing model completely removes.

If they do release a buggy version - and I'm talking,...supuer-duper buggy and super-unstable like, say.... version 8.0 - what are you going to do?

Not upgrade to the next version the next time they release it?

Downgrade to the previous stable version?

You can't do either of those things anymore, and they already have your money (including for that next version if you're on a 3-year payment or 5 year payment cycle for example (not sure if they have 5 year)).

The only incentive then to pushing out a Hotfix to fix the buggy unstable new release at that point will be for saving face on their end.

You wouldn't want those Nemetschek stock prices to take a hit, after all.

One could argue that the other incentive to release that Hotfix quickly will be to mitigate many people dropping the subscription altogether, but that's the other hidden advantage for them in having everyone on Subscription model.

Suddenly it's not so easy to drop Archicad and just walk away, as all your legacy projects are tied to the most recent version of their ecosystem,....for one thing,....and for another... you can't (easily or simply) downgrade your projects to a stable previous version, or more pointedly, to the last perpetual license version that would allow you to still access your files and projects outside their ecosystem while not being subscribed.

You're essentially tied to them - ball and chain.

Unless you make the painful painstaking and costly decision to convert your projects to another format in advance and then leave that way.

And anyone who says,.... "well, people can do that anyway at any point they feel like",.....hasn't really gone through the headache and cost of migrating a firm's projects from one format to another system.

So yeah, theoretically one would think that that should be the logical conclusion to how it will work out, but the reality is that human nature will not allow it to play out that way.

[Lee Hankins]

I’m running 30 on macOS Goldengate and only have the issues Graphisoft have already acknowledged. Opening from the start screen usually works but does sometimes cause a crash, a reboot resolves that and the sticking cursor causing a drag command. Other than that it doesn’t seem to crash. 

[runxel]

Thanks, Lee!

I had somebody writing me that after an upgrade to Goldengate they experienced much less crashes, so it might be indeed tied to Sequoia. 😓

[Lee Hankins]

Just be cautious upgrading to Golden Gate, I’m having a massive issue with it constantly freezing on the screen lock after screensaver activation at or around 14:15 every day! It’s a bizarre one. I’ve narrowed it down to potentially an incompatibility with the LG external monitors. 

[mthd]

Hi @Lee Hankins, thank you for the advanced warnings about the stability of Golden Gate. 

Hi @runxel, I too am still on Sequoia on my Mac and thank you for the warnings about using AC30 with those reported crashes.

I will hold off using AC30 until it is stable with Sequoia or other macOS.

[pesik]

Thanks for reporting this, and thanks for ticking the "personal data checkbox" in the bug reporter, it does help a ton sometimes.

While we still haven't finished our full analysis yet, one of the triggers for this specific crash seems to be Archicad's appearance set to not match your system's. That is, if you have macOS set to Dark mode, and Archicad to Light mode (or vice versa), the crash might occur when using keyboard shortcuts. So a simple workaround for the time being is simply setting AC's appearance to match the system's. Far from ideal, but might get you going until a fix is delivered.

[runxel]

Thanks for that analysis and your reply @pesik !

That is ... oddly specific haha. Good to know that there is some kind of workaround.