Who said SketchUp doesn't need to be 64 bit?
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@tt_su said:
@pixero said:
But why are you so secretive about the future?
It's not just friendly ears that listen...
Sorry but I don't buy it. Why can can so many other software companies have a more open relationship with their customers?
It's not like every other 3d software is trying to catch up with SU. Rather the opposite. -
Thomas,
Thanks for also taking the time to respond, but now I feel even more miffed than before.
So there are not a few things, there are many things wrong that is causing us not to be able to use SU like we use other software?
Can we concentrate on the issue of SU buckling and folding under minimal poly levels, is this caused by many little bottlenecks or just one?, can you tell us all the bottlenecks preventing me from having a medium sized model? (medium in in other softwares)
What ever happened to your quads crusade?, I too thought we'd be seeing them in SU by now.
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Oh for crying out loud.... I thought for sure we were past the same old smokescreens.
Look, if SketchUp is meant to be platform for other people to build on then it is a very poor platform that does not allows 3rd party developers the best tools to do thier work. 64-bit is simply a tool SketchUp (as a platform) should be providing to every 3rd party developer.
The idea that 64-bit is relevant to why SketchUp high poly performance is so poor is just misdirection. The real culprit there is primarily the video card and openGL... where if SketchUp were to embrace more advanced technologies the user could see real improvement. However as long as SketchUp is designed for users running cheap integrated graphics chipsets, instead of requiring dedicated workstation graphics like any proper modelling app, this will remain the case. All you need to do is load a heavy scene and disable the fancy viewing options to see dramatic performance improvement... this is all the proof needed to see this in action.
The idea that "converting to 64-bit is too much work" is a valid excuse is beyond rediculous.... what have you actually done in the last 5 years that is so impressive that we should accept such a lame excuse? Stop wasting time designing websites and actually work on the software people are paying for!
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@jason_maranto said:
what have you actually done in the last 5 years that is so impressive that we should accept such a lame excuse?
May I point out that Trimble acquired SketchUp in 2012. During the six years of Google the focus was mainly on Google Earth integration and now much otherwise.
So what about the two last years with Trimble?
Turning the ship around. Changes are happening and as we continue to staff up there will be more noticeable improvements.@solo said:
Thanks for also taking the time to respond, but now I feel even more miffed than before.
Cheer up buddy! I know it's no fun being on the outside trying to peek in, but during the six months I've been on the SketchUp team I've become very positive on the future.
Just because the technical bottleneck is different that the initial assumption doesn't mean it's a bad thing. I only mentioned it because I didn't want people being perpetually disappointed by expecting a technical buzz-word in the release log. Focusing on assumed technical details is clouding the more useful higher level discussion. What are your goals with the tools you use?
@solo said:
So there are not a few things, there are many things wrong that is causing us not to be able to use SU like we use other software?
This is the entry to something that can be interesting. How is it that you use other software and what do you do? Then compared to SketchUp and how you use that?
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@tt_su said:
A 4x increase would not be enough to make that operation fast.
Quite the opposite, a 4x increase would be amazing!
@jason_maranto said:
Look, if SketchUp is meant to be platform for other people to build on then it is a very poor platform that does not allows 3rd party developers the best tools to do thier work. 64-bit is simply a tool SketchUp (as a platform) should be providing to every 3rd party developer.
I often disagree with Jason, but he's got a point here.
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- I have not seen one specific example of model presented showing the problem. I do not mean just the skp file, but all the other settings along with data on the target system showing RAM usage, processes running etc, what graphics, graphics memory and etc. There are many permutation and combinations that can contribute and until the problem is understood I am sure the developers feel they are in a undefined box.
- For the windows users there are many resources available but you have to be willing to take advantage of them. Many of these are same Microsoft uses in their resolution of problems.
- Those who think Trimble should have a nice road map of long range plans are not living in the real world, that info is usually closely help and you will not see any specific detail unless you are a level 2 manager or higher. Those many times will be in 3 to five year long range plans. Reading the base camp notes they have and the scan explorer, ruby begugger etc. release should give one some sense of what those are. With the statement they are staffing up the question in my mind is for what?
- For those rejecting off hand the thoughts John B and Andrew give makes one wonder why you are not working at MS or some other development company. They may not give the answer you want to hear but have the info base you should at least listen too. IMHO they are missing the boat not making better use of the employee badged folks showing on the forum to help answering some issues ,but that goes back to long range plan and man power use. IMHO I would think say a web type conference with a select user set often vs the 2 year base camp show and tell could help to establish what their long range plans should be or even what near term fixes are required.
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@jiminy-billy-bob said:
Quite the opposite, a 4x increase would be amazing!
hmm.. not really. you'd adjust quickly..
as in, i used to do renders which would take 8 hrs.. nowadays, i can do the same in 2hrs with better hardware..
2 hour render is not 'amazing'.. waiting 2hrs for a render to complete or waiting 2 minutes for a judge_able preview still kinda sucks when you're in the middle of a project.amazing is real time rendering.
if an explode takes 1 minute today.. and 15 seconds tomorrow.. that 15 second explode is still going to be annoying and i won't be sitting there going "wow! this is fast!"
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Warning! Irony ahead.
Sorry I just had to get it out of me so I made this quick drawing:[irony]
[/irony] -
@mac1 said:
- I have not seen one specific example of model presented showing the problem. I do not mean just the skp file, but all the other settings along with data on the target system showing RAM usage, processes running etc, what graphics, graphics memory and etc.
..and on and on..
look at it from the opposite side.. let's imagine sketchup was 64bit.. do you think anybody - user or developer - would be saying "oh geez.. i wish it were 32bit"
i.e.- an attempt at trying to differentiate between "going 64bit is a heckuva lot of work" vs "going 64bit will not help anything"
i'm pretty sure if there were a magic button which the suTeam could press and sketchup were suddenly 64bit, they'd all push it.. without hesitation.
i get it that i might be wrong about that assumption but maybe i'm too hard headed to truly believe it.. i really think they would all push the button.so if that is in fact true, everything which comes afterwards "benefits are minimal" and/or "performance may actually suffer" etc.. it just comes off as excusey sounding because if there were an easy way to switch to 64bit, none of those explanations would happen.. sketchup would be 64bit.
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@jason_maranto said:
The idea that 64-bit is relevant to why SketchUp high poly performance is so poor is just misdirection. The real culprit there is primarily the video card and openGL...
Processes like import, explode, copy, save/autosave(!), etc. are not opengl related. And this is what really annoys me - simple operations that can take forever. And things like beveling should work in realtime (maybe not for 1 million polys, but for normal models) - watching this process bar is really laughable.
Sure, this is nothing where 64bit would help, and as i said before making SU 64bit would not help very much without increasing the overall performance - when working with objects/geometry AND the display performance, but i think the opengl performance is the smaller problem. But... if SU would be able to deal with bigger models, then 64bit would be needed very quickly. I'm currently working in Max on models with 20-30 million polys that need 10-15GB RAM. Applying a turbosmooth i can easily max out my 32 gigs...And btw. x64 doesn't have to be neccessary slower i think. I have seen tests with very different results for different apps - some slower and some faster (sure, some maybe RAM related, so maybe they were faster because of more RAM).
But almost every other 3D and 2D app i'm using has done the move without noticable performance decreases (maybe 2-5%) - so, why should it be so dramatically for SU?!? To get a reasonable performance gain in SU it has to be increased maybe 10-100 times for some operations - what would be a decrease of 5% if the overall process is much faster?!? -
Yes, I was talking specifically about viewport/real-time rendering performance in SketchUp as relative to OpenGL.
For the operations you are specifically talking about it is more likely that a combination of multi-core (this is the type of thing it was meant to address) and better coding would the solution.
One of the salient points they keep dodging around is the fact that overall performance would naturally improve by doing the 64-bit conversion. The reason being the whole code base would need to be re-factored and that means old parts of the code they haven't touched in a very long time would get full rewrites... that is always going to net alot of (perhaps small, but cumulatively significant) performance improvements.
At this point I suspect the real reason they are so hesitant to do this is they have code they simply do not know how to deal with, since the originators are long gone.
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@numerobis said:
And this is what really annoys me - simple operations that can take forever. And things like beveling should work in realtime (maybe not for 1 million polys, but for normal models) - watching this process bar is really laughable.
i think that's more along the lines of what thomthom was talking about regarding algorithms..
the actual formula which is being used to get from point A to B..then your mention of a progress bar suggests you're talking about a ruby plugin.. and my understanding is that ruby is by nature ,or by implementation(?), a slower way to execute code.. but realistically, a beveling plugin if written in C++ with optimum algorithm would/should fly when compared to a more poorly written ruby version.
(and in my experience, on mac at least, anything that required the progress.rb (or whatever it's called) is a zillion times slower than when the progress bar isn't being use.. i tried to bring this up to chris fullmer once during the shape bender development but i don't think he believed me.. now that he's no longer requiring progressbar, shape bender is way faster for me again.. maybe i'll make a little demo to show this.. i'll put in in a different thread though as to not steer this one too far off topic)
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Hi, Frederick and everyone else,
I'm responding to Frederick's message directly, but I'd like to be clear about the fact that in no way should anyone perceive the following message as pointing fingers at him. I'm using his quotations as a convenience to answer the questions he asks which I think are on most people's minds. But please keep in mind that everything I say here is directed toward the community in general and please no one take offense if something rubs you the wrong way.
@frederik said:
I'd challenge you and claim it's because they know zip about 16bit, 32bit and 64bit software...
You're talking about the average Joe who's using SketchUp similar to how they're using MS Word or Excel...I agree 100%. "Simple" Pro users of that type would consider SketchUp to be every bit as integral to their work as Word or Excel, and yet they may not come anywhere near using the vast array of capabilities of any of those programs the way power users would. But as such, those folks aren't pressed by problems with 64-bit, at least not in the way power users may be. And yet, those folks buy SketchUp in huge numbers, and have just as many other complaints, problems, and feature requests for it as the outspoken power users on this forum. We take very seriously our duty to pay attention to these users' needs just like we do our power users.
@frederik said:
I know huge architectural companies who are using SU professionally on a daily basis, but where no-one are part of either the official SU community nor do they know about the existence of this board...
Exactly my point. Those people have myriad other ways of getting in touch with us beyond the forums--particularly the enterprise customers, who work with dedicated support and sales personnel. So just because they're not part of this community doesn't mean we don't have ways of gauging their interest and finding out what they need.
As an example, would you believe that the most important thing enterprise organizations want is for us to completely rewrite the licensing engine and provide better in-product identity management? We've spent a ton of time examining how we might improve licensing, and I'll bet almost no one in this forum would care. While it isn't something the average Pro customer with a small firm would care about, by sheer numbers of affected Pro users, it dwarfs the 64-bit proponents by many orders of magnitude.
And as for those categories of users who aren't getting in touch with us in any way? Well, an awful lot of complicated mathematics and heuristics go into classifying our user sets and extrapolating what features are (or will be) needed by those groups, even if they can't speak up directly. Yes, this is something we very much pay attention to!
@frederik said:
I'd say that less than 2% of the multiple millions of active SU users in the world cares about joining such communities...[i](As an example, I'm quite certain that there's a huge customer base in the Far East, who would never join this board...)
This is absolutely true. Mainland Chinese is the second-most-popular language of SketchUp besides English. And as such, we've dedicated tremendous resources to the Chinese market. The Sophie character who loads with SketchUp 2014 is a member of the SketchUp team, a native Chinese woman who leads our business development, support and outreach endeavors in China. By virtue of both the program running in another language and the people there using it for different things and under different regulations than elsewhere, Sophie has her finger on the pulse of an incredible number of issues that aren't even on the radar for our English users.
@frederik said:
The SCF community has grown to more than 250.000 users... As a software developing company, you should embrace every input you can get from here... Positive as well as negative...
Believe it or not, trust me or not, WE DO LISTEN! We love SketchUp and want to put out the very best product we can. We are also very keenly aware that without the income we earn from selling Pro, there wouldn't be a product at all, so of course we're interested in hearing every suggestion we might use to make the product better--to get new customers and keep existing customers as happy as possible.
If we didn't care to hear about the problems and criticisms, none of us would be here. Most of us don't have the time to ever post in response, but user suggestions and conversations such as those in this thread are read, passed along, and distilled by our team all the time! We don't ignore any of this stuff. All of it goes into the bug tracking and feature request systems. Maybe we've not reiterated this fact enough, but maybe we just took for granted that you all would know that since the people on our team are all the type who really do listen carefully when we say we will.
I'm not sure this community on the whole understands well enough that just because we don't implement every single suggestion we read here doesn't mean that we're not listening. Some of those suggestions are things that are in the works, or which are on our radars to do "someday". Others are those which we have considered, but ultimately dismissed. While we may not explain every decision and folks might not agree with our reasoning even if we did, our eventual dismissal of certain ideas doesn't mean we're completely oblivious or unconcerned about what our users have to say.
To reiterate what I said at top, I'm not directing everything right at Frederick, but at the whole community--especially in this case. Something I think a lot of people need to be reminded is, "you are not our only customer." While we work diligently to make everyone as happy as possible, the simple fact is that we have too much going on to pursue every single thing requested of us, and many times, keeping one set of users happy means consciously making choices that dissatisfy another group. We do the best we can.
Also, I know it's easy to forget or not to notice, but if you take a look back over the years and years of SketchUp development, there are plenty of examples of huge things we have done in response to user feedback.
@frederik said:
Solo have a great point with his statement:
@unknownuser said:
...especially folks that use 3rd party integrated software...
Jeff also has a great and very legitimate point:
@unknownuser said:
won't it have to go 64bit eventually?
We're very much aware of those folks who are using third-party software or running into problems with the 32-bit setup for whatever reason. We're also in agreement that SketchUp will have to go 64-bit someday. We've never said otherwise. It's just that, for myriad reasons, we haven't done it yet.
@frederik said:
I'm not saying that if you take the 64bit route, all issues will get cured, but I really don't understand why you cling to 32bit, when everyone else go the 64bit route...
By now, I've answered this in other messages that have come since. I'm just reiterating that I have indeed directly answered this question. Even so, I'll say it again, this time in a more succinct presentation.
Yes, we know SketchUp must go 64-bit someday, and in fact, all of us on the SketchUp team very much WANT it to. However, nothing is ever as simple as just wanting; if it were easy or free, we would have done it already. The technical endeavor of migration to 64-bit will be very difficult, expensive and time-consuming, requiring tremendous investment of skill and care to ensure the quality and performance of SketchUp do not suffer. Although there are some serious limitations of the current 32-bit system for some users, we believe the community greatly mischaracterizes the issue and sees a 64-bit binary as a silver bullet that it simply is not. The reason a 64-bit version has not yet been released is a business decision that stems from careful consideration of the the costs of the endeavor and the true benefits to be had, in light of our other priorities. Those other priorities come from several sources, including not just customer suggestions and wish lists, but those tasks which are found to be of critical importance to growing our customer base and the promotion of Trimble's strategic vision for our product and the company.
Andrew
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@krisidious said:
@hieru said:
What would SU be without all the great plugin developers here at SCF?
I doubt I'd be using SU if not for the developers here at SCF.
We made the decision a very long time ago to actively promote the extensibility of SketchUp through use of the Ruby API. We continue to believe that the developer community is a crucial part of the SketchUp ecosystem and we are pleased that we are able to continue our part of the vision to provide a powerful and flexible, but easy-to-learn and easy-to-use, 3D modeling application that fulfills critical needs for everyone from students and hobbyists to professionals and enterprises.
Andrew
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Hi, Jason,
@jason_maranto said:
Same song and dance -- and you know I bought it, but that was when I though you guys were actually going to do "something" (anything) with the resources saved.
If your mind is made up, then so be it--there's no need to be swayed by a real person giving an honest and forthright explanation of the situation. You're welcome to find your own reality if you'd like.
Five years ago, we were owned by Google, and as is the case for all assets of a corporation--product, personnel or otherwise)--they had the final say in charting the direction of all of those things until the acquisition by Trimble in June 2012. An awful lot of your anger could be saved by reading between the lines of so many messages posted to this forum about those times and by simply considering the fact that SketchUp was eventually sold to someone else. If you want to blame someone for whatever happened for the few years before the Trimble acquisition, take your complaints elsewhere.
Once you get past that and focus on only the last 22 months of our time at Trimble, you'll have the opportunity to get a more realistic perspective of things. I think it would behoove you to consider the reasons why Trimble made the SketchUp acquisition, how they would hope to make back such a major investment of capital, and what sorts of plans they would have for it in the future under their control, before making any claims about what we've been able to accomplish in these circumstances, let alone what role 64-bit compatibility should play in our long-term plans or how concerned we should be about whatever company X has done. I'm not saying you'll agree with it all, and that's OK; not everybody will. But I think if you were to assume good will on Trimble's part rather than ill, the rest of us here on this forum who are trying to build a helpful and uplifting community of users of this product would meet with enthusiasm the positive change in attitude and outlook that might result.
@jason_maranto said:
However, in light of the fact that you have done essentially nothing for the last 5 years, I would say that all you have shown is that you in fact fully intend to keep doing nothing for as long as you can get away with it.
You'll have to excuse my saying so, but to judge that the SketchUp team members or Trimble on the whole are intent upon doing absolutely nothing with SketchUp--despite the welcome reception of the work we've done at Trimble by many other of our users; without consideration of any long-term or strategic goals of the company we work for; without accepting the need for us to spend 18 months of our time on the difficult and resource-intensive contractual obligations we incurred upon splitting with Google; and without taking the time to get to know any of us personally--seems tragically misguided.
@jason_maranto said:
Try selling your misdirection to somebody who is foolish enough to actually buy it.
Again, the only thing you're ever going to get from me is the truth, as absolutely clearly, and fully, as I'm permitted to give it. I'm not some machine in a PR factory. I'm just a guy who loves the team I work with and is passionate about creating something awesome for our users.
Like I said before, I'm powerless to stop you from embracing an alternate reality if that's what you desire, but it doesn't seem terribly fruitful from where I sit.
Andrew
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Thank you AndrewS for your considered and in-depth comments.
I do have a question stemming from these:
@unknownuser said:
and the promotion of Trimble's strategic vision for our product and the company
@unknownuser said:
without consideration of any long-term or strategic goals of the company we work for
In general terms so as to not divulge critical information to those "other ears", what is that vision and/or what are those goals?
I am in no way trying to be sarcastic, but genuinely would like to know. Will the answer affect my use of SU. No. I make a major portion of my living using SU (and Thea). I will continue doing so until my bosses decide otherwise.
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maybe offtopic_ish but...
@numerobis said:
And this is what really annoys me - simple operations that can take forever. And things like beveling should work in realtime (maybe not for 1 million polys, but for normal models) - watching this process bar is really laughable.
@unknownuser said:
and in my experience, on mac at least, anything that required progressbar.rb is a zillion times slower than when the progress bar isn't being used
see this post for example:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=18210%26amp;p=522514#p522514to me, that's a clear cut example of bad/inefficient code in progressbar-- not coming from the sketchup side of things
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@frederik said:
I've been thinking... ... If the primary obstacle for not making SketchUp 64bit compliant is a matter of limited resources, why don't the management find a solution to eliminate this challenge...??
As we've announced at Basecamp and elsewhere, Trimble keeps an incredibly close eye on the bottom line of the SketchUp team. They're inclined to give us more resources when we prove that we're able to manage ourselves and perform well along the way. I'm happy to say they've been thrilled with our performance so far and continue to allow us to add new personnel to our ranks in ways that were never achievable previously. We've been very smart about our growth though, and we've expanded nicely across the board, from marketing and sales to product management, to development and QA. We can't simply add a whole slew of engineers to our team without pushing all of our numbers out of whack, but besides, we're actually growing as fast as we can given the amount of top-notch talent we've been able to find. We have pretty high standards.
@frederik said:
I mean... What about outsourcing some parts to specialists...??
Perhaps it's not very popular, but there are plenty of very talented developers in i.e. India - and I would assume also in China...See the point about very high standards. Also, we have done that to some degree, involving other teams here at Trimble when it makes sense, and by leaning on some outside contractors for certain self-contained features. For instance, we've had help from the outside with some of our built-in importers and exporters from time to time.
@frederik said:
In my previous career I was working close with some developers in India and - to my surprise - it actually went very well...
We've had both good experiences and bad. Trust me, we're leveraging this avenue to the limit of our comfort.
@frederik said:
Arguments that you don't have sufficient resources doesn't last...
Yes and no. It's not to say there's nothing we can do as a team to try to grow ourselves; as I said before, we're doing it as well and as quickly as we're able to.
Trimble has been very supportive of us growing, as long as it's responsible and well managed. But you also must consider that while our SketchUp team has direct control of some amount of its resources, some other percentage of our growth is attributable to hiring people to work on the strategic and long-term goals, as determined by the company.
So while yes, we're growing steadily, and yes, we have enough people to apply some to issues that never could have gotten attention before, there's always going to be a limit to how much we can do--a limit that makes us prioritize our efforts, sometimes in ways that are hard for us, or our customers, to swallow.
Andrew
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@jeff hammond said:
for me personally, having a 64bit foundation is more symbolic than any immediately noticeable performance gains that one may or may not see.
it's modernizing the base application and signifying sketchup is ready to grow into the next decade or two.
Jeff,
I'm glad to hear someone share those sentiments, because this is exactly the kind of thing we constantly consider. Trust me when I say we've grabbed the modernization bull by the horns.
When we break down the time to spend doing engineering work on SketchUp, we consciously divide the tasks into three buckets: bugs, features and infrastructure. We then choose some percentage of each of those things to be addressed during a given release cycle.
It's pretty obvious what bugs and features are, so I'll skip the explanation there.
The third piece, infrastructure, is what you're talking about WRT modernization, and that's where I spend the vast majority of my time. In our use of the term, infrastructure refers to the (generally invisible) things that happen both under the hood of a software product, and behind the scenes of its development, to keep everything working smoothly. For instance, some of my infrastructure projects for this release are upgrading our source code control system, upgrading our continuous build/integration system, and completely replacing all of the official Windows build servers we use to create SketchUp. Some other examples of infrastructure projects are upgrading the versions of Xcode and Visual Studio we use to compile the product; upgrading, replacing, or eliminating various third-party libraries we rely on; improving our test automation systems; working out difficulties with the processes and systems we use for language translation; or redesigning certain areas of the code that are so complicated or convoluted that every time we go in to work on them, we introduce an inadvertent bug. None of these things will be directly seen by any of our end users, but as you've alluded to, if we don't pay attention to them and allow the build-up of too much technical debt, it could be a death knell.
In any given release cycle, sometimes we choose way more bug fixing. Other times, we choose more infrastructure. It's difficult to get the right balance because every user of our product would judge the necessity of each of these things differently. We do the best we can to select a set of tasks that will give us the best balance. It's usually very difficult to decide where things will fall.
You've probably heard us talk a lot about under-the-hood improvements in 2013 and 2014, again, without seeing any of them. Suffice it to say that we've been working hard to recover from a few years of amassing too much of that bad technical debt...
Andrew
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@andrews said:
Yes, we know SketchUp must go 64-bit someday, and in fact, all of us on the SketchUp team very much WANT it to. However, nothing is ever as simple as just wanting;
simple for the user.. not so simple for the developers..
re: the magic button i was talking about earlier.. you guys don't have the magic button.. but we do- it looks like this:
your magic button is hard to push and requires lots of effort.. ours is real easy to push so we just keep pushing it over and over.
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