SU upgrade to 8.0.4811 (Maintenance 1)

Rich O Brien · 12 Jan 2011, 18:31

Thanks Google

Frederik · 12 Jan 2011, 19:38

Installing as I write this...

Gaieus · 12 Jan 2011, 19:55

No official announcement yet. Although there are exciting things!

boofredlay · 12 Jan 2011, 20:03

Well there you go, the release notes were just posted up.
http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=release_notes.cs

Many new fixes but most notably the Shadow Bug is fixed

chrisjk · 12 Jan 2011, 20:04

Looks like a pretty big bunch of stuff has been fixed or improved.

ken · 12 Jan 2011, 20:29

Just a question to the Sketchup team. Would it be possible to have the upgrade not upgrade the materials, components or plugins? Or at least give someone the choice of upgrading these three directories.

Other than that small quibble, thanks

Ken

Gaieus · 12 Jan 2011, 20:33

fixed shadow bug
LAA aware (on 64 bit OS)
bigger image export
codecs fixed
unicode character enhancements in LO-2-dxf/dwg (this affected me big time)
and a lot more...

@unknownuser said:

Would it be possible to have the upgrade not upgrade the materials, components or plugins? Or at least give someone the choice of upgrading these three directories.

I do not understand this, Ken...

ken · 12 Jan 2011, 20:49

Well, when you upgrade if you don't rename the plugin, components or material folders, you loose all you plugins, materials and components. So every time I have to rename these three folders and than re-name them back to the use able names after the install. I was just thinking, if the upgrade did not install/re-install these three folders without asking first, it would save me the worry I may overwrite these three folders.

Now, I just have a feeling I may be doing something wrong.

Ken

Gaieus · 12 Jan 2011, 20:55

I have never had this issue on my PC. In fact, I have upgraded like 6 times for the last couple of weeks/months now without any problem and losing anything. It only overwrites the default, native SU content 8that comes with the install), nothing else.

jeff hammond · 12 Jan 2011, 21:04

wow, ended up being a nicer update than i initially thought

i found an issue with the shadow string fix though.. it fixes the strings but introduces another problem..
i'll post an example a little later.

ken · 12 Jan 2011, 21:08

@gaieus said:

I have never had this issue on my PC. In fact, I have upgraded like 6 times for the last couple of weeks/months now without any problem and losing anything. It only overwrites the default, native SU content 8that comes with the install), nothing else.

Gaieus

I believe when I upgraded from 4 to 5 I lost all my plugins, materials and components. Never had the courage to try again. So, next upgrade I will save a copy of these three directory in another directory, and try your method to install over.

So, make this a duh!! moment for me.

Thanks Gaieus.

honoluludesktop · 12 Jan 2011, 21:14

Gai,

Shadow bug fixed! .animation (codecs fixed)? Wow!

Maybe my office machine will create animations now.

Per Google: "/Largeaddressaware". Does this mean that 64 bit computers can now address bigger files, while 32 bit machines retain the benefit of speed?

I hope the api fixes will not cause problems for "workarounds".:-)

Gaieus · 12 Jan 2011, 21:56

Ken; yes, testing it won't harm (just in case)

HDT: LAA, I believe, will only be useful on 64 bit. However you can also "hack" a 32 bit OS to be able to assign more RAM than 2 Gb to a single program.

d12dozr · 12 Jan 2011, 22:05

A comprehensive release! Toolbar fix fixed LAA

Thanks Sketchup Team!

kwalkerman · 12 Jan 2011, 22:08

model.raytest fixed!! with the optional boolean attribute as well. THANKS!

And the shadow bug fixed. That's a nice surprise.

--
karen

thomthom · 12 Jan 2011, 23:05

@honoluludesktop said:

Per Google: "/Largeaddressaware". Does this mean that 64 bit computers can now address bigger files, while 32 bit machines retain the benefit of speed?

Yes - Under 64bit Windows, SU can now address up to 4GB RAM. (I have tried it with a huge render.)

AndrewS · 12 Jan 2011, 23:16

Ken,

@unknownuser said:

I believe when I upgraded from 4 to 5 I lost all my plugins, materials and components. Never had the courage to try again. So, next upgrade I will save a copy of these three directory in another directory, and try your method to install over.

My colleague, Steve, and I were responsible for creating the SketchUp installers for Mac and Windows. I have only been on the SU team for just over three years, so I can't speak to what technologies were in place back in the 4 and 5 days. However, on Windows, for SketchUp 7 and 8, which were built as MSI-based installers using Wix, if you're just installing a minor release (anything where the major version number stays the same, like 7.0 -> 7.1 or 8.0 -> 8.0 maintenance release 1), you should be perfectly safe to run the upgrade in-place. The Windows Installer technology is supposed to be smart enough to replace just the files that differ in your current installation vs. the new installation, without removing extraneous files or replacing directories wholesale.

This does highlight the point that if you've made any modifications to files we provide, those modifications could be lost in an upgrade. However, you should never (99.999% of the time) need to overwrite any of the files we provide for you with your own modifications anyway. If you need to modify something like a LayOut template, copy the file and make a differently named version with your modifications so they can be preserved separate from what we've provided. And, in the cases when it is possible (such as with LayOut templates), store your own files outside of the SketchUp directory structure, just to be on the safe side.

Obviously, with things like plugins, you have no choice but to put the files inside the SketchUp directory, so if it worries you, make a quick backup of the SketchUp directory before proceeding with the upgrade, but do know that we expect it should work without such intervention.

Andrew

AndrewS · 12 Jan 2011, 23:47

@honoluludesktop said:

Per Google: "/Largeaddressaware". Does this mean that 64 bit computers can now address bigger files, while 32 bit machines retain the benefit of speed?

Sort of. In short, the flag will help many people, but don't be surprised if it doesn't improve your specific situation.

For all of the reasons discussed a million times before, migrating SketchUp to compile natively as either 32 or 64-bit is a very difficult and incredibly time-consuming endeavor. However, when we heard about the possibility that the functionality of memory-intensive operations might be improved without going all the way to a 64-bit migration, we jumped at the chance to try it.

Those who brought the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag to our attention touted it as a magical cure-all. Indeed, we had high hopes that it would make a marked impact for those folks who really want to work with much larger files; we invested quite a lot of work in turning that flag on, ensuring we had done it correctly and consistently throughout SketchUp, and testing the results. Unfortunately, in the specific case of compiling and linking it into SketchUp, Style Builder and LayOut, that flag is more snake oil than miracle cure.

I did some pretty extensive testing with large images after we first introduced that flag to our compilation, on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines with Windows XP, Vista and 7, all with varying amounts of RAM from 1 to 12 GB. After all, we also needed to make sure the flag didn't break anything either.

Although I found many cases that showed improvements on 64-bit machines with more RAM than was usable in previous versions of SketchUp, overall, I was disappointed because it didn't make the staggering difference we all expected. Although many of you will find the improvements to your liking, SketchUp is still going to fall short for those of you who want to perform actions that are an order of magnitude beyond what SketchUp has traditionally been able to do, such as exporting 10,000 x 10,000 pixel anti-aliased images.

It is worth noting that in some cases, the threshold for seeing problems varies by the operating system. For instance, I was able to export high-res PDFs from LayOut under Windows 7, which failed on XP. Oddly enough, I even showed such a test case that worked really nicely on a Win 7 machine with 1 GB of RAM, while failing on Win XP with 4 GB RAM. Although we were not able to pursue that issue down to its root cause, we believe that in some cases, the inconsistency is due to differences in the system libraries distributed with each platform, or possibly, in the way the kernel of each OS manages memory. Apparently on Windows 7, even with 1 GB RAM, the memory management for that operation is much better overall than what happens with Windows XP. Strange, but true.

Andrew

John Sayers · 13 Jan 2011, 06:18

GREAT UPGRADE - THANK YOU SKETCHUP

thomthom · 13 Jan 2011, 07:20

@andrews said:

Those who brought the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag to our attention touted it as a magical cure-all. Indeed, we had high hopes that it would make a marked impact for those folks who really want to work with much larger files; we invested quite a lot of work in turning that flag on, ensuring we had done it correctly and consistently throughout SketchUp, and testing the results. Unfortunately, in the specific case of compiling and linking it into SketchUp, Style Builder and LayOut, that flag is more snake oil than miracle cure.

The people who will benefit the most from this are probably render engine users, like me. Some render engines run inside the SU process. Previously you'd be in trouble if you rendered large files as things would crash when memory usage creeped up to 1.8GB. I had found a utility to change the LAA flag in SU8M0 and that had saved me a few times when I had to squeeze out some larger renders. I'm glad it's not LAA out of the box and I don't have to use hacks to enable it. The extra 2GB availible has helped greatly.