"What change are you talking about? Not much has changed in the basic geometry handling of AutoCAD..."

I'm actually asking about the changes that allow other programs to do things like parametrics and dynamic re-assignment of the drawing plane that AutoCad can't do. It just seems to me that they are stuck with some core functionality that they can't really improve on in an efficient manner, so they end up buying newer companies in order to keep up with the competition. I'm guessing that the way the math is handled at the base level is what they are stuck with and if they changed that they would break everything else.

I teach AutoCad, Inventor, Revit and Sketchup at the technical college level. (I got interested in Moi in order to learn about nurbs based modeling in case students start asking about it. Everybody wants to be a car designer!) AutoCad has reached the point where they continue to change the interface year after year without actually improving the efficiency. I wish they would just leave it alone, but that doesn't sell new copies of the software.

Hi unclecharlie,

> I'm actually asking about the changes that allow
> other programs to do things like parametrics and
> dynamic re-assignment of the drawing plane that
> AutoCad can't do.

Well, those changes would most likely be just raw speed increases in the computer hardware.

In general things that are dynamic and more graphically intensive also require more CPU cycles to make them happen, and 30 years ago when personal computer CPUs were much slower than they are now that would have an impact and tend to limit the software design more.


> It just seems to me that they are stuck with some core
> functionality that they can't really improve on in an
> efficient manner, <...>

Yeah, that is a pretty common problem - sometimes older programs become complex over time with layers of stuff built on each other and when things get to a certain size it is a really big job to try and alter various kinds of lower level things. Or I should say it's a really big job to alter such things without causing a large number of bugs from various other parts of the program that assumed that things were structured in one particular way...


> I'm guessing that the way the math is handled at
> the base level is what they are stuck with and if they
> changed that they would break everything else.

I don't have any information about it specifically, but it's not necessarily anything to do specifically with math handling, it's just easy for quite a lot of additional code (including code from other companies as well when you have 3rd party extensions going on as well) to have dependencies on the existing overall design, and trying to change that design would require a ripple effect of changes needed to a lot of other code as well.

- Michael