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!

[Hmooslechner]

In my profession as teacher on a school for young technicians aging from 15 to 18, i would not argue to uptate to archicad26, because  i dont see any real benefit in Archicad26 for us in teaching. It would be just an useless effort for installing - but before, i have to look if Graphisoft is forcing the newcomers at myarchicad to use 26 by not offering 25 to them. I will see.

Just changing the interface is no real improvement in my opinion. There are so many "open buildingsites" in Archicad and they had years  to make things better in this version, but i have the feeling, Graphisoft is "cooking in its own soup" without having the ear on the arguing of the users.. and now "some kind of **beep**storm" is braking over them - and i hope its not too late for Graphisoft...

There are so many great functions in Archicad and ist a mess, they don't hear to their custumers to really improve the existing workflows what would really badly needed in real working-situations.

They - in fact - "better'd" some bugs, but in so little places, the normal user will not really notice at all, bugs they should have solved years before - ok so far. - but thats just worth a silent update - not a major release.

I really "wrote books" for suggestion for Graphisoft. Even before the Interent began since version 5.5.  Many of my suggestions where implemented - some much better, than i intended.. and Archicad got better these days. But now..

I am tired to write suggestions since some years - since - in the german forum, they blanked out the suggestions-section for just-visitors. You have to be logged in to see the suggestion-section - just as if they did want to tell new visitors the problems of Archicad.. You can guess what i think of this policy.  And since then, this suggestion-section just seems to be a "garbage dumping ground" for Graphisoft.

And so, the Archicad-development began to stuck - to the point, where we are now.

Solution:

Hear the Users, don't "cook just in Your own sauce". 

Graphisoft - You want to succeed?

Then don't be afraid of bettering things really! 

"never change an running system" is NOT the real choice for You any more.

What we need: - much less mouse-cklicks with much better results.

What we don't need:

More searching for commandplaces in the interface that You just altered to sell us a so called Major_update with no real benefits...

I really would hate to loose all my efforts to learning this program, when the market  would point to better solutions from the competitors...

[TDF_Colin]

Do we have an ETA on when Archicad 26 Solo will be available? as we run Solo and Full and assume you cannot open 26 files in 25

[Barry Kelly]

One week ago at the launch, they said it would start to roll out in two weeks.

Not all language versions though, they will follow later.

Barry.

[Jmoeda]

when the pt-PT version will be released?

[Jim Allen]

I decided to take a more detailed look at the 'new' Library Part Maker and perused the new User Guide.

What I found is that it is in effect the same as the old one. It has no new parametric geometry options.

This means it's only useful for making really complicated objects whose geometry seems to be fixed.

So - what is touted as one of the few new features, isn't actually new at all.

Having an annual update like this with so little to promote is one thing, not being open and admitting it's a minimal release because they are concentrating on major new features for AC27 is entirely another.

Instead we had a whole load of irrelevant marketing BS and an overblown launch to cover Graphisoft's embarrassment.

I think this must be a screw-up, because who at the end of last year's release, planning the next version would dare to propose so little progress?

This tends to imply that bigger things were planned, but didn't make it in time. The fact that GS haven't even released any information on previewing new features to be introduced later in the year (like they did with Param-O) means that there is nothing significant on the radar this year.

Not acknowledging there was nothing new to make upgrading worthwhile is a lot more worrying.

I could accept a 'fallow year' in the expectation of a 'bumper harvest' next time, but that's not what we have been told.

I think that's significant, and not in a good way.

[mthd]

Sadly many appear to be disgruntled with the recent upgrade content for both 25 & 26 ?

Do we have the true picture and are there some who are satisfied with both 25 & 26 ?

If it’s only the disgruntled that are posting, we may not have the full picture ?

Probably needs a serious poll and a rating system scale of 1 to 10 to see how satisfied customers really are with these recent upgrades ?

[Lee Hankins]

Unfortunately it’s human nature to post complaints rather than praise. We have upgraded to both and whilst there were no show stopping new features like previous versions such as renovation filters and graphic overrides, the smaller updates and tweaks we feel make the upgrade worthwhile. Whilst the changes to attribute manager have been controversial I haven’t found it to be a hinderance and the change to layers in folders has already had a positive impact on our productivity. We can’t expect major new features every time and the changes to attribute manager is part of a much much bigger project. 

[Martin Jules]

On my side, I try to maintain the balance. Above all, I thought to myself that the people running Graphisoft are also intellectuals and I guess they're not crazy either. I give them that benefit of the doubt.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

What will this prove, exactly?

What purpose would such a poll serve to show?

If it shows that 50% are satisfied with the recent upgrades and that 50% are disgruntled, does that then mean that the disgruntled users' concerns are invalidated?

On the flip side if it shows what many would imagine it would show, that something like 70 or 80 or maybe even 90% are dissatisfied, does that move any needle at all in any significant way?

It's not like Graphisoft don't already know that people are dissatisfied with the supposed "progress" (or lack thereof) we've been seeing in recent versions. They've been hearing it for years now and it's yet to have an impact on them to do anything different.

The problem with polls is that they afford you the luxury of ignoring very negative results you don't like which don't align with how you're thinking, or to use numbers you deem to be positive to convince yourself you're doing the right thing and not actually engage in any  introspection or critical self-improvement.

Don't believe me?

Look at the Wish List forum.

What good has introducing polls to it done to getting anyone's feature requests fulfilled?

There are feature request and tool improvements there that have close to 90% poll ratings.............that date over 10 years old.

Which means that for over 10 years Graphisoft have seen that some features are heavily requested and considered important for users, and for over 10 years they've simply ignored them and focused on what they wanted anyway.

Which is then the flip side of that where you have "features" and improvements" that are either hardly requested, don't poll very high or simply don't appear anywhere in the Wishlist forum at all, being treated as high priority improvement things we "need" by Graphisoft.

So what is the point then?

To give people the false impression that they're being listened to when they're really not?

We already know that.

We've already had several versions now to press that point home.

A poll now to try to show that there are users who supposedly like this version more than the disgruntled users' complaints are presenting will only serve to send the wrong message to Graphisoft (if they're even looking for one) and to deflect the very much deserved criticism they're getting now, and probably as a tool for their messaging and marketing departments that they're on the right path and are "really delivering what their users are asking for"

( ^^ they really used that line in one of their marketing spiels in one of their more recent version release marketing campaigns).

I mean, come on.

We've all seen this kind of cynicism and cynical approach to bad user/customer relations with, and from companies before in our lives and in other areas of life as well.

It doesn't help anybody to coddle people in their under-performance and low delivery of what's expected of them or promised by them.

[mthd]

BC, you do raise legitimate concerns and that’s good and productive at times.

I would like to see more appreciation from you for features that you like and have benefited from and used both past and present.

I just know that if we want to get the best out of those working for us in our day, old school being a bit too harsh, doesn’t usually get good results for us ?

Show your appreciation and be more fair.

Constructive criticism can help if the tone is not negative but positive.

We all want to get good value for our money with our AC subscriptions but realistically, you cant please all the users at the same time.

I think that is because there is a very wide and varied construction industry user scope with the current AC user demographics.

CAD software development has gone way past the very early conceptual days, when some of us went into the early Autocad schools and came out still seeing that drawing boards were more time effective in many cases.

I want to see AC get better and faster in some of the very basic functions as well just like others do.

I think Archicad is still the best architectural software on the market at present otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it.

I am retired now but I still follow its development closely because I came from the days when CAD was in it’s infancy. I am still intrigued by its direction of development.

[DGSketcher]

---

@mthd wrote:

Show your appreciation and be more fair.

@mthd It's a two way street. Yes there are players at GS making positive contributions to the expectations of the customer base, BUT the last three years have offered little positive software development for the significant sums invested by the users under the guise of the maintenance/upgrade/subscription/scam. For those of us who have been around for a long time, which I assume includes yourself from your signature, AC has always had a positive trajectory of improvement, but more recently the product has lost focus as an architectural solution and the new development lacks a real sense of understanding typical workflows. Indeed the structural intervention has been a premature deviation that has brought about neglect and even a surge in fundamental bugs. Dimension instability is a definite no, no in the CAD world! Yet with AC25 that is what many of us have been expected to endure, but it's ok because we have SAM to compensate. Bring us bug fixes, workflow & interface improvements and something from the Wishlist to make it worth upgrading and the praise I used to throw at AC will return, until then it's a case of a report card that says "Easily distracted and could do better. Must try harder."

[mthd]

I have been retired since 2014 and have kept my subscriptions up to date till AC24 just Incase I could go back to work ?

I see clearly the things that need to be focused on allot more by the development team like you and many others do.

I hope they are listening very carefully to us all and what we actually really need in the way of improvements etc.

I am happy about the focus on cabinets in AC25 & 26.

So positive for those improvements from my perspective.

I am just saying that we need to have them pay more attention to our wish lists.

Yes subscriptions are expensive and we definitely want and need value for our money.

keep trying and don’t give up asking for the improvements that we really need.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

---

>>>>"I would like to see more appreciation from you for features that you like and have benefited from and used both past and present."

In this version?
I appreciate the fact that they released it on time.

Does that count? ( ...as appreciation?)
But then again that's less an actual "feature" and more a given expectation, but with Graphisoft and their recent releases, even that low bar can be hard to cross sometimes (looking at version 23 released some months late)

As to actual features in this release that I appreciate, the ones that actually pertain to what I do are features addressing issues I've come to learn how to work around thanks to their long-standing neglect of addressing them (extruding and duplicating circles, the attribute and layer folder system), or are features I never really needed addressing that urgently (Eleventy Gajillion ways to customize kitchen cabinets)......certainly not over other more pressing long-standing issues.

And the less said about "new" features that don't pertain to what the primary function of this profession is (Architecture), the better for everyone.
Even though that's what they seemingly spent the bulk of their development resources - and our licensing and subscription fees subsidizing them - actually "addressing".

I don't get what purpose showing appreciation for features from PAST releases serves in this version release.
I did show my appreciation.....THEN for what was produced THEN.

I'm not for showing appreciation for things that weren't done (...in this version) for just for the sake of showing appreciation.
Performative courtesy and graciousness helps no one, and if anything is more an insult to the person it's supposed to be meant for.
If you don't mean it why do it?

>>>>"Show your appreciation and be more fair."

I am being fair.
By being honest even if it means being frank and yes,......even hard.

(Hollow and disingenuous) Appreciation does not = Fairness

>>>>"Constructive criticism can help if the tone is not negative but positive."

It can also help when the tone is negative, if that is the only way to convey one's frustration with a particular situation.
Negative but not disrespectful.

I believe everyone who's expressed frustration and disappointment with this version release - despite being what you'd term as "negative" have all mostly been respectful in their expressions of their frustration.

>>>"I want to see AC get better and faster in some of the very basic functions as well just like others do.

I think Archicad is still the best architectural software on the market at present otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it."

So do I.
We just seem to disagree on how we can get to that place where it's better and faster.

Like I said before I don't believe in coddling people when they're under-performing.

We, as a user-base have long been coddling them or at worst being non-expressive about our frustrations with the direction they seem to be taking the program or heading and its impact on what we do, and what good has that done?

(Frog in the slowly heating saucepan)

We're now three versions deep into successive, persitently and regressively underwhelming and disappointing version releases, but we're all just supposed to just sit still and quiet and trust that there's a longer game we can't understand and and long term map that will eventually come good.

Some time.

......In our lifetimes (.....we hope).

I don't know in what other arena in life that kind of situation would work, be accepted or even be remotely workable.

If Graphisoft want (TRUE) appreciation and all the plaudits (from actual users) and understanding for the tribulations they have to undergo to produce a good product, then they should earn it.

I mean,....REEEEEALLY earn it.

It used to be that the majority of users used to show their appreciation for the program by heavily recommending it to colleagues and acting as a sort of 12th man in their marketing team helping spread the word about what a great program this is.

I can't remember the last time I recommended Archicad to anyone I work with.

And that's just disappointing.

[mthd]

I thank you for your honest assessment and candid reply.

I agree with you on many things.

would I recommend AC ? Yes for any Architect.

Do I think the focus on 3D engineering collaboration is shifting the focus away from the basic functionality of AC ? Yes.

In the end if AC is not developing in the way we expect it to, then it’s up to us to decide if we will keep renewing our subscriptions.

I think we just need a more targeted approach to each specific user base.

I think the Solo Version could be made to include more basic features and be more widely available for us who do not need the high end tools of the full commercial version.

like I have said before, a dedicated software development team working on the Solo Version, maybe the solution to this dilemma ?

[Jim Allen]

I think it's worth trying to inject a little objectivity into debates like this.

I don't think it's controversial to say that there have been no significant features introduced in AC26.

Is that significant? Personally I think it is.

For example when the mesh tool has been broken (the inability to have points with identical x and y values but different z values - so no kerbs or retaining walls in survey meshes) for several years, it's an absolutely legitimate concern with the dedicated terrain modelling tool.

The import mesh from surveyors data has never been fit for purpose. Random Delaunay (or whatever) triangulation simply isn't good enough, when TINs from survey packages create meshes based on 'biased' triangulation (kerb points connecting to kerb points etc) but can't be imported as meshes. Yes we can import them as morphs, but that negates all the benefits of the mesh tool.

When I get survey drawings, polyline contours can have thousands of points, so I need to redraw every single contour with splines, because there is nothing in the standard toolset to allow me to simplify these polylines. It can take me 2 days just to trace contours. The triangulated surveyor's terrain models can't be imported as meshes. It's ridiculous.

So I can work around the mesh issues, but it's clunky, and I shouldn't have to waste my time with it. The part of the world I work in is full of sites with complex topography, and as I don't work on small projects, manually creating every single terrain model simply isn't an efficient use of my time. 

Another example of overdue improvements is that SEOs still don't display on plan, and when you need to do things like create splayed  window reveals (yep another thing that we could/should have had years ago in the window objects) and you use SEOs, you  have to mess around to get things to display properly on plan. It's not how things ought to work.

In addition to basic window functionality, our library objects aren't comprehensive enough. Commercial metal gates anyone? Roller shutter doors? What about fully louvred doors? What about door signs? Different handles on different sides of the door? What about the ability to show proper projection views of custom components in the railing tool? This is a fantastic tool. I use it for things like planters, spur shelving, paths, kerbs and canopies. However custom components don't display properly in 2D. It should be an easy fix.

We can overlook these things only for so long. The GS team(s) dealing with objects can create them independently of any core application changes.

What about Param-O. Introduced recently, I found it great, but it lacked some key requirements for parametric modelling, like the ability to introduce non-structured absolute values into pick lists, and conditional branching. 

Instead we have diversification of Archicad into different markets when some major functionality issues for the primary market remain unaddressed.

I'm a big fan of Archicad, it's a fantastic application, and for a complex BIM application, pretty easy to use. I have really enjoyed working with it. Mostly.

However I've got to the stage when although there are huge gaps in my knowledge/ability with Archicad, when I find basic shortcomings with some of the the basic tools I use on every job, I think it's fair to claim that there are problems that ought to be addressed.

I think GS needs to listen far more to practising professionals when planning development. At the outset, the architectural workflow was evident, and it was clearly designed by architects for architects. The world has moved on though, and the tools we need to deal with for more and more subtle real world issues are I suspect well outside the scope of architectural experience of the development team.

When you get people making decisions about software for professionals, I would argue that you absolutely need to engage deeply with your user base.

Academics, programmers and people with limited experience in the commercial world are arguably not the best people to develop and implement features for practising professionals. It works however if there is a constructive and healthy two way dialog between developers and the user base.

I've been involved in development of commercial software in my spare time for over a decade, and I have designed workflows and interfaces to be easy and intuitive for end users, and I have built features which respond to the actual real world requirements we have. I have used my experience of a practising professional to drive product development, the product I work on also has an active user forum.

I'm not sure that GS properly understand user engagement any more. We have these forums, but the paucity of AC26 features and big gaps in capabilities would lead me to believe that GS aren't listening to the people they want to buy and keep buying the product.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

This is a fantastic post.

You've articulated many problems I've been having with AC on a recurrent basis, and what's scary to me now is how I've stopped seeing some of them as problems that need to be fixed simply because I've found (often clunky) workarounds to navigate them in combination with the belief that Graphisoft will never get around to dealing with them.

Specifically the Mesh tool survey import and mesh creation headaches.

And why the hell hasn't anyone thought of intergrating the Complex profile function into other tools like the ability to create custom window or Door trims, reveals or casings.
If you're not going to revamp those latter two tools wholesale then at least give us this one.

And geez,......metal gates, parkade/garage gates - both commercial and residential.
Proper SEO floor plan display,.....

This is basic stuff.

You sometimes forget just how much is in the laundry list....

....simply because you get used to either working around them and finding awkward solutions that shouldn't have to be what you're forced into,......or finding third party solutions, if they even exist,......or simply giving up on them altogether and just old-fashioning '2D -drafting in what it should look like' (which I guess is essentially the first option)

Yes, it's true that it doesn't seem like GS is listening to users - at least not the ones on this forum or places like LinkedIn where the tenor of dissatisfaction hues similarly to here.
But they are listening to someone it seems, because I can't otherwise make sense of how they spend three versions introducing and then continuing to develop SAM tools at the expense of all else that needs addressing, and then considering this to be a great (or sustainable) PR and marketing strategy.

[James Murray]

Great post. (Edit: of Jim's. I hit the wrong reply button.) More positivity would not have improved it.

In the olde tymes, GS was proud to have architectural experience in house. Now it is conventional software engineering and marketing all the way down.

One quibble/pile-on: For the mesh tool, "several" years of stagnation = 20+. Pitiful.

[mthd]

Interesting observations about the mesh tool ?

Coming from a Chief Architect Premier user, the terrain tool is very easy to use and to create a terrain with spot level input points.

I think the mesh tool in AC has improved since but not quite enough it seems ? 

Although cabinets have improved in AC 25 & 26 I can still do them much faster in placing and editing them in Chief Architect.

Chief Architect is half the price of Archicad and has many of its own problems and limitations and that’s why I prefer Archicad.

Chief Architect doesn’t have to support such a huge range of 3D collaboration and complex geometry and they can focus more on the DIY & residential home builders market.

GS could buy a module of Chief Architect and implement some of their superior functions right into Archicad ? A bit like how Autodesk bought Revit to make Autocad easier to use ?

Software can develop greatly with APIs just like Cad image tools have helped Archicad to be more user friendly.

I started with Chief Architect because I couldn’t afford to buy Archicad in the beginning but when I saved up and bought it at 8.1, I was very happy to have the best CAD software on the market for Architecture.

I am still very happy with Archicad but I understand how it must meet the needs of 3D collaboration in the commercial world and that’s exactly why we are feeling that the basic functionality is not progressing as forward as it used to be.

I believe that they will get it right by balancing the future development with 3D collaboration needs with basic functionality.

Right now 3D commercial collaboration with engineers is taking most of the focus.

I believe more free form commercial structures are being built around the world and this could be a major factor contributing to the way Archicad is developing ?

We had the industrial revolution but now it’s the free form revolution in the 21st century.

Quite obvious but a true indicator of how Archicad is developing.

We are all now compelled to reserve our final assessment of Archicad 26 until all the updates are finally released during the cycle.