Graphisoft public roadmap - Follow-up conversation

[Gordana Radonic]

Dear Community, 

We're excited to have published our roadmap!

We'd love to hear your thoughts and questions. Please feel free to use this thread for discussion.

Graphisoft Insights announcement: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Graphisoft-Insights/Graphisoft-public-roadmap/ba-p/375281

Public roadmap on the Graphisoft website.

Thank you.

[4hotshoes]

I agree. Sketchup is here to stay because it is flexible and very intuitive and has a simple structure that is very adaptable for different users. Sketchup is focused for the AEC industry but cheap enough for new users to explore ideas with it.

when apps like Revit and Archicad try to be all encompassing for an industry as diverse as AEC, the apps get big, bulky, bloated, more difficult to learn and prohibitively expensive for the smaller firms. However, the small firm of (1-10) users are where the majority of users actually work, is a mistake. To ignore them and cater to the mega firms is an eventual dead end as a limited market.

I personally have my own copy of AC, but since I now work for a local firm. I cannot justify to keep paying for SSA as the price keeps climbing. I am being pushed out of being an Archicad user. I was hoping to keep my options open. 

[Romans]

We are talking about real 3D and BIM applications, and SketchUp is not. It is about sticking faces together in 3D space. Nothing more. The information generated in SketchUp is useless except for visualization. Advantage: it is easy to use and not expensive. 
The cost factor is otherwise really a huge roadblock and impacting the budget heavily, especially Revit (see all the open letters complaining about it). The Revit users are already in this cost trap with no way out. GS is unfortunately also heading this way with its subscription offers: ~ 250 € / seat / month is insane; imagine you have 5 or more seats..... (https://graphisoft.com/buy-now)

The discussion here was about the impact of AI tools. See SWAPP: these kinds of tools will attract developers and investors (and their building departments), and not only the big ones. It will increase competition and stress for small-scale offices/studios as well.

[DGSketcher]

I don't want to get bogged down in the pro's and cons of individual products or their costs, there are two fundamental elements to the design process, the designer and how they communicate. The designer will find a solution to communicate their design which will be based on personal circumstances and client expectation. Whilst at one extreme you may have users oriented to AI driven and inevitably expensive & complex solutions for huge BIM and infrastructure projects, at the other extreme is the designer filling the gaps which can be as simple as adaptation of a structure for mobility / accessibility needs to comply with local code / regulation. The successful software solution is the one which covers the middle ground and delivers a solution that is easy to use. Inevitably GS will choose their own development path based on their financial drivers, (user feedback doesn't seem to carry much weight just now).

So the question each user has to ask... In a subscription driven market where loyalty carries no value, do you take the ever more complex usability path with the additional burden of irrelevant tools & cost, or do you look for an effective alternative workflow, which is simpler and more affordable for your communication needs? 

[jl_lt]

I agree about Sktechup. Even though i absolutely hate it, i know first hand what it can do in capable hands; and its modular approach with its many add-ons, ensures that the core product stays clean and accesible for the new users.

Archicad, on the other hand, its suffering the path that clean and elegant software like Evernote suffered in its time or what Dropbox is suffering right now, which is: investing on adding non-essential features nobody asked for that bloat the software until it turns it into an unsuable mess, just to justify a suscription cost, without realizing that the core software is what we actually wanted all along. 

[Rex Maximilian]

Great example with Evernote... I moved on to Notion!

[jl_lt]

I had never seen such a beautiful software, that is evernote, being so completely trashed by wrong minded people.  In another thread Karl Ottenstein mentioned it is actually getting better again, but i wont even try it by now. Same will happen with Archicad if they dont change direction fast.

Graphisoft, you showed your cards and apparently almost no one liked it. What are  you (and we) going to do?

[Karl Ottenstein]

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@jl_lt wrote:

I had never seen such a beautiful software, that is evernote, being so completely trashed by wrong minded people.  In another thread Karl Ottenstein mentioned it is actually getting better again, but i wont even try it by now.

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Someone else;  I've never used Evernote.

[thesleepofreason]

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@DGSketcher wrote:

So the question each user has to ask... In a subscription driven market where loyalty carries no value, do you take the ever more complex usability path with the additional burden of irrelevant tools & cost, or do you look for an effective alternative workflow, which is simpler and more affordable for your communication needs? 

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That is definitely a pressing question for any user that want to remain effective and competitive. Such alternative workflows has started to emerge and will definitely continue to do so at an increasing rate with solutions like Speckle and other open source projects acting as drivers. It might seem utopic but I think that many small to mid size offices soon will be able to rely on such workflows rather than taking on recurring expenses for features that don't carry their own cost whether by being irrelevant or being limited/underdeveloped.

There will still be a need for a main application but it will be evaluated on how well it facilitate the fundamentals of the design/model/documentation process and anything extraneous will either be disregarded or seen as negative. 

Archicad have a head start in the race but seem to wander off course rather than setting the shortest path and picking up speed. Coming up behind them are applications like Rhino and Blender or even Sketchup or Sharpr3D who all make up a lot ground with the development being geared towards user-centric design functionalities.

[EserDuzcan]

Thank you for sharing the roadmap.

Personally, it feels good to know what's coming beforehand.

Especially these can be efficient for my workflows:

• Enhancement: Interactive Schedule formatting
• Issue Creation on BIMx Mobile.

I would vote on these topics on under research to be prioritised: 

• Issue synchronization on BIMx
• OPEN BIM workflow support on BIMcloud
• Support IDS (buildingSMART Standard) in Archicad.

I can suggest a couple of new ones:

• Ability to combine layouts into a new compound layout
• A section dedicated to all penset selections that are available for the selected item in the settings window for custom penset structure users
• Detailed and mass control over properties and attributes through schedules

Great work.

Best of luck.

[Tim Ball]

Hi Gordana

What will happen to all these comments?

[Rex Maximilian]

I don't see them carrying over to the RoadMap interactive comment section when it's activated. I suspect the comments here will just remain and the discussion will become dormant. But we can always reference them here with permalinks and paste them in the Roadmap... or copy the text from a comment here and paste there/

[Laszlo Nagy]

Rex,

I am in the process of writing a summary that collects all user feedback I find on various platforms and get it to the people within Graphisoft who need to know about it. It will not be dormant and forgotten.

[Rex Maximilian]

Thanks Laszlo. The reason for my saying that things may be dormant and forgotten, or that the conduit from user feedback forums to GS is filtered to an almost impenetrable degree is no commentary on you, but rather because as a long time user I've seen years of feedback and feature wishes that have been "extremely" popular and widely discussed never see the light of day on subsequent ArchiCAD releases.

While I feel that more people from R&D, as well as corporate, should be active on here; I appreciate the job you are doing.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Thanks.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Tim,

I am in the process of writing a summary that collects all user feedback I find on various platforms and get it to the people within Graphisoft who need to know about it.

[4hotshoes]

Hmm. I was just thinking how that might be a job for AI and Notion. 

[Bruce]

In my signature is a link to a mindmeister mindmap of my own Archicad improvements wishlist that I've been maintaining for over a decade.  The greyed-out items are ones that used to be only wishes, but have since become part of Archicad.  There are a lot.

I don't know if this is coincidence, but it's evidence that Graphisoft constantly improves the software, and fix existing tools (e.g. Beam cover fills).  Sometimes it may take a while, but they are constantly at work.

[Rex Maximilian]

Have you compared your list with the last three or four updates? Because that is where the falloff of core architectural tools fell off.

[mthd]

A very nice format to your list Bruce. Easy to see and to follow, we need more of that over here for people like me who like diagrams with written explanations.

[mthd]

We all understand that the 3D structural model forms a critical part of the project and that can dictate how spaces are adjusted to allow for structural and MEP components. That doesn’t mean that the Archicad core development should slow down by any respects like it apparently has particularly with version 26. And what other professionals users have observed with prior versions.

[Flarback]

Hi Gordana,

Maybe I missed this but I can't help but to notice that there is no sign of Python or Grasshopper anywhere in the roadmap...

It's been a few years since you launched the Python palette, it still feels like a simple marketing scheme. The automation possibilities are completely crippled by the fact that you can neither create new objects nor deconstruct existing ones. Any plans for when you will enable better functionality in the Python palette, so that we can start automating our process for real (like most other programs can, Revit, 3DsMax, Rhino to name a few...).

I get that the Grasshopper live link can do some of this, but since it's release it's always been unstable to use, frequent crashing. With the startup time of Archicad this is not a pleasant ride... Additionally it relies on other software with separate license costs. At bigger companies where many colleagues can't handle Grasshopper, automation with Python inside Archicad would reach an order of magnitude wider.

For a modern professional program, focused on architecture, I think the priorities of development should be in Architectural design, not Structural/MEP. New design related functions, and efficiency improvements (such as automation) is to me what should come first!