Archicad 26 is here!

[Noemi Balogh]

This is the connecting forum thread for Archicad 26 is here!

What is your favourite new feature? Share your thoughts and opinion here!

[DGSketcher]

I don't feel too bad about Dev bashing for two basic reasons 1. I pay them to hopefully deliver some useful improvements 2. They or their handlers aren't listening to the end users.

What is really frustrating is seeing someone trying to rewrite industry standard workflows on data organisation & management (Files / Folders) with something so bad. These workflows have been developed for decades for maximum efficiency yet AC26 seems to have completely ignored so many of the basics. What has been delivered to the user isn't a multiyear project it is a simple rehash of the user interface. I would be very surprised if the latest interface couldn't be reformatted in days if they wanted to do it. The data we are seeing is the same as AC25 just laid out differently. There may be complex restructuring behind the scenes but that isn't our problem, it is for GS to manage and protect that data to suit their future plans. The important part is usability and on that front AC26 has failed badly. And slightly off topic but try using macOS Dark Mode with the attribute settings, three years on and there are still lists that are unreadable due to white text on a white background. 🙈

[David Shorter]

Yes it’s important to note that WE ARE THE CUSTOMERS

[mthd]

It might a sound harsh what some are saying here but I think they all have the best interests of GS and Archicad at heart.

You can tell that they love using the software but they are just expressing how they feel. I think the developers would understand what many of us are asking for now and in future versions ?

Simply put, we are not engineers. Archicad doesn’t need to follow the Revit business model. They need to focus on the Architect first and then the basic collaboration, not the other way around.

Anyway, I understand their frustrations and they are just honestly expressing their opinions. English politeness doesn’t apply to the full national users base. Some cultures express their frustrations and they are not being rude, just honest and clear about how they feel.

So please don’t take the constructive criticism from Architects here to heart. After all they get paid to show others how to build great designs. Now they are asking GS how to build a better Architectural CAD software for us all to use.

[DGSketcher]

The Nemetsheck Annual Report is publicly available for anyone that wants to read it. One aspect that I found interesting was their strategy of having design to construction solutions but some lack of clarity as to whether this was to be delivered through fully integrated or "Federated Design" solutions. I guess we will find out in due course.

One part of the report that that did make me wonder about what is going on between GS & their holding company was the following statement on page 40...

Innovation Focus

All brands are continually developing their solutions. In their respective segments, the brands have focused on issues such as improving the user-friendliness of their solutions, process optimizations and integrated interfaces and connections for a smooth OPEN BIM workflow. The focus in the year under review was also on improvements aimed at minimizing the time required, increasing efficiency and productivity in the planning and construction process, and optimizing workflows.

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Personally I don't recognise that statement in AC26? 

It was also interesting to note that the Nemetscheck share price took a bit of a hit on the 14 July. Maybe there was more than just members of the Community Forum watching the launch.

https://ir.Nemetschek.com/websites/Nemetschek/English/1000/stock.html

[Martin Jules]

If you observe the Autodesk's behavior on the market vis-a-vis Nemetschek, the trend is to restrict the expansion of its products around the globe, especially Archicad by imposing more conditions that can prevent Archicad, for example, from developing its capability of exchanging with standard platforms using extensions that belong to it. We don't know when it will decide to restrict the .dwg and .rvt extensions as well. Therefore, Nemetschek must act as wisely as possible to avoid greater surprises to its brands' users in the future.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

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@DGSketcher wrote:

.........

It was also interesting to note that the Nemetscheck share price took a bit of a hit on the 14 July. Maybe there was more than just members of the Community Forum watching the launch.

https://ir.Nemetschek.com/websites/Nemetschek/English/1000/stock.html

 That would be a start.

It's also noteworthy that Autodesk only changed course after that infamous open letter from two years ago by their customers, after their stock price began to take a bit of a hit and there was a serious threat of a major rundown on their share prices.

I've always intimated that we're probably never going to se a real genuine and honest commitment from Graphisoft to positively change for the better and start actually listening to people until one of two things (or both) start to happen.

Nemetschek's stock price actually starts to take a serious hit in a way that can only be correlated to customer dissatisfaction of one of their main companies and loss of faith in the direction they're going.

Or if Graphisoft themselves observed in real time the number of subscriptions and licenses falling off a rock as users decline to renew until the get better.

(...which,....presumably could also lead to the former).

As long as they can keep showing that their SSA subscriptions and overall license sales have increased or stayed the same each year they have a piss-poor release, then there's really no actual incentive for them to improve or do better.

Because who would feel the need to pull up their socks and do better when they still get paid the same even when they're doing sloppy  and substandard work?

[jl_lt]

At least in México, and im sure also in the rest of latin América, the percentage of this Big integrated office ammounts to less than 1% of the total practices, and a lot of the best architectural work is not done by these offices (of course, some of it is). So all the integration mjules talks about has little correlation with the quality of architectural results. So why cater so much to them? Let revit choke on them! 

The reason for this is simple. Mantaining such a big office is very difficult here, even for some of the more famous offices, thanks to the ammount of money clients can pay relative to the work needed.

The solution for bigger projects, at least here, are the so called "integrators", that is bim specialists that are hired as external consultants as a third party to assist but the architectural office, engineers and contractors to create the bim model, so the fixed bim costs are absorbed by someone else instead of the architectural office once the project is finished. Otherwise, with all the económic turnmoil here, they would be out of business very quickly.

So mjules, there are more realities than what you have in the USA, please dont generalize. And i thought Graphisoft was more aware of this. Not all projects are 70floors towers or airports!

[mthd]

To be fair,

I do like the improvements with the cabinets from AC25 and now AC26.

The simplification of the navigator.

All improvements are much appreciated by me.

And yes, I do think that you need to listen more carefully to your loyal user base who pay for high SSA fees each year.

I am just a burnt out CAD monkey looking to make my job much easier.

Thank you for your input.

[Jim Allen]

I honestly don't think I'm going to bother upgrading to AC26.

I have a Forward licence which supposedly gives me new content and updates annually, but this year - honestly, is there really much point?

Each upgrade requires the entire office to upgrade, and in environments where users are restricted from upgrading their own software (like mine) every new release and maintenance upgrade is a bit of a pain.

The templates need to be updated and the libraries migrated, all the models updated (and for BIMcloud SaaS the model needs to be downloaded, upgraded and re-uploaded) and we get a whole load of new issues that we probably didn't have with the last stable version of V25 - and for what exactly?

Is any of this worth the aggravation? For me it's a definite no.

It's not just that it's the worst Archicad update in at least 7 versions, it's one of the worst upgrades I've ever seen of any major software packages.

It's making me reassess my pathological hatred of all things Autode$k...

[Bricklyne Clarence]

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@Jim Allen wrote:

.........

It's not just that it's the worst Archicad update in at least 7 versions, it's one of the worst upgrades I've ever seen of any major software packages.

It's making me reassess my pathological hatred of all things Autode$k...

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And to think  here that about a year ago we all thought that version 25 was one of the worst updates in recent memory in terms of how feature-thin and worth-less-ness it was.

And of course we all gave them the benefit of doubt that they were just coming out of the pandemic lockdown year and like other companies were facing workforce crunches and issues with work-at-home situations.

Well, we're now well over two years from the worst effects of the pandemic and they certainly out-did themselves in not the best sense imaginable.

It also continues to boggle my mind just how in two different universes these people live in.

Over at the official Archicad Facebook page, they're busy patting themselves on the back over a successful version release and launch event.

Everywhere else in user groups like here on the Talk forum, LinkedIn, Slack,...you name it,...and everyone is rather displeased,...to put it mildly, with what Graphisoft have put forth as their version update.

Almost like they're completely utterly (and willfully so) blind to the harsh reception this version is getting among actual users, or just how or why users are so angry right now.

[Martin Jules]

And they still don't have the decency to apologize through a press release. This implies that the main issue is not related to the pandemic.

[Martin Jules]

@JL@jl_lt Come here with data from official surveys to show that Archicad is mostly used by multidisciplinary firms in North America. Even governmental institutions or public offices there don't use Archicad for security reasons according to what I've been told by some officers. 

Thus, you wouldn't like Graphisoft to also address this kind of issues by targeting these market segments while there are lots of employees who would prefer working in Archicad in these firms or institutions. Why do you want Graphisoft to exclude them in the package? 

[jl_lt]

Thats right mjules, it is my humble opinion that Graphisoft just cattering to those big offices at the expense, and possible alienation, of the smaller ones is an extremely risky move, because its dedicating too many resources applied to a small market segment (big offices most of whom already use revit and wont switch).

Could it payoff in the long run? Its possible, they are Graphisoft after all, but the current signs and state of things are not encouraging.

Unfortunately, catering to a small segment and alienating its current user base is exactly what seems to be happening  

[Martin Jules]

@jl_lt Archicad is also a good software for multidisciplinary firms, and most of them are looking for a BIM software alternative to that of Autodesk. Why not welcome them to the big family of Graphisoft too? Why do you prefer excluding them in the package?

[jl_lt]

Because @Martin Jules, i like to exclude death weight, bloating (be it due to liquid retention or bloatware) and complication

[Martin Jules]

Let all the firms, regardless their size, come to Graphisoft. Don't stop them. The Graphisoft's Kingdom is for them too! 😀

[mthd]

It all comes down to your perspective as to wether you think that Archicad 25 or 26 is a big enough upgrade or not ?

For MDF (Multi Disciplinary Firms) or those using the full power of BIM, like A Chief Architect working on a large commercial project, would have their own point of view.

You would have a different view than a person using Archicad just for custom residential low rise housing ?

Its definitely not a case of one size fits all anymore, particularly since the exponential development and growth of CAD software is over now IMO.

Growth from very earlier versions of Archicad was allot greater during the upgrade cycle than what we see today or in recent years.

Yet this shouldn’t give the software developers an excuse to skimp on features for the basic user like me and many others who don’t use the full package.

Quite frankly the ACSE is not really adequate for a small firm without proper render engines or other 3D tools. You take interior designers for example, they need good render engines and so do low rise home designers like me.

It would definitely be good to include these render engines in the SE as well as other 3d design modelling improvements.

I am sure that many interior designers would be very happy with new furniture design tool that needs no scripting. Not to mention the improvements in cabinetry.

These last two upgrades are definitely very good from the interior designers perspective.

All improvements are well appreciated by me.

[Jim Allen]

C4D is an awful render engine! Redshift is a highlight, but that was in V25 as well.

SE is great if you don't need hotlinks.

With C4D, for renders it's faster to export to something else and use that for images, and there are a lot of other options, including Unreal Engine which is free.

There is no new furniture design tool - it's just some updates to the Kitchen Units objects and Library Part Maker.

The latter is an old tool we already had that was pretty useless so almost no-one bothered with. It wasn't parametric, so they introduced Param-O, which was very promising, and they they ignored and apparently replaced it.

Have you actually used Library Part Maker? It's overly-complicated and clunky.

Yep - some minor updates to a single type of component.

For Mac users even multi-page PDF import is pointless, because you can do whatever you need with Preview.

And yes - still no native Apple Silicon version which is on its third iteration.

Maybe it's time to revise our expectations downwards and keep looking around. 

We all know how this works - in todays's world, if you stand still, you effectively go backwards.

[jl_lt]

Yes it is. Until they for some reason want to model rebar. Then its not.

[James Murray]

We have no plans to migrate to AC26 in the near term. (Usually we update quickly.) This is a very thin release with a couple of nice-to-haves (Nav search, e.g.) but nothing compelling for our work. The attribute organization changes are currently a negative feature, with a long way to go. We'll see how AC25 runs on the Mac Studios when we finally get them; it may be that the Silicon-native 26 is worthwhile in comparison. If not, we will skip 26 entirely. We are maintaining our SSA since it isn't economical to jump in and out of that, but we are pretty annoyed that GS is lighting our fees on fire chasing hypothetical customers' needs, instead of our longstanding wishes. Not a cheerful time in AC world IMO.

[Martin Jules]

@James Murray We could have forgiven Graphisoft for this release. This is referred to as course errors. We could forgive the company up to 3 course errors for example. In short, my biggest problem is the effort made by the Graphisoft team to get people talking about this release. This makes me worry because it implies that the team could consider this release as being one of the best for 40 years. My second big problem is the timing chosen to release this version, which could confirm that the team really considers this release as one of the biggest ones. If that's really the perception the Graphisoft team has of this release, there's reason to be concerned!