Not sure what response you guys are hoping to get. Can you clarify? If you have particular issues, let's discuss them in an orderly manner. Though for the sake of others who don't want to wade through all 19 pages of this thread, perhaps it would be better to start a new one?

John
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@jgb said:

As for Google not listening.......

er... how many times have I posted so far in this thread? Half dozen times, maybe? I think I lost count a few weeks ago. If you haven't picked up on this yet, I'm actually the Product Manager for SketchUp– which means I'm exactly the person you want to be reading your posts if you desire something about SketchUp to change in the future.

It may be useful to remember that having an idea yourself doesn't automatically mean that the feature should be implemented. It may not be something that legitimately benefits every user. Also, it may be that we like your idea, but can't implement it for any of a hundred valid reasons that have to do with time/money/resources or just some limitation in the way that SketchUp is designed to work.

Our occasional surveys and "Moderator" voting series' are a way for us to make some sense of the inbound feature requests. They aren't the sole source of input, but they are quite helpful. If you'd like to discuss new features you think we should implement or old features you think we should have implemented differently, I'm open to doing that. Ordinarily I do that on our Help Forum (in the "Feature Suggestions" category), and I post there quite regularly. Occasionally, I also read posts here on SketchUcation. I think I've responded in great detail to most of the concerns you've raised previously, but I don't mind doing so again.

john
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@victor.feliz said:

• Skychup won't be fully integrated in Sketchup since the SDK only provides access to read/write skp files so there is no way to access to the viewport. My intention is to have a "two clicks solution" and comunicate Sketchup with a external app (Skychup) that will render the background according to your camera position and day time

Hi Victor,

You may want to have a look at SketchUp's Ruby API (not the SDK)– I think it gives you ample access to the active SketchUp model to render a skydome. Ping me privately if you want more information on that.

john
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@edson said:

I have 325 items on my plugins folder.

...that's kind of a lot of plugins, Edson...

john
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@bmike said:

OK, I just swapped my backup folder of Plugins from my original SketchUp install. All is working fine on that model I posted.

So... there is a conflicting plugin somewhere...
Here's what I was running:

Hi again,

Tricia is running through a couple tests, and it does seem likely on our end that there may be a conflicting plugin installed. Can you share with us the list of plugins that you have installed when you see crashing or other instability with Solid Tools?

thanks-
john
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@edson said:

...most of the times it crashes sketchup even though I may be testing them with the simplest of solids.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to reproduce your crash, either. I'll pass your file on to Tricia and the rest of the QA gang to see if they can reproduce the problem in the lab. Which solid operation are you trying to do? Most importantly, are you submitting crash reports? If so, can you mention the name of the file you posted so that we can correlate the crash with the file?

thanks,
john
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@kostas_designer said:

I've always had this wish, amongst others:
Alpha channel support when exporting images.
Extremely handy for grafic post production works..

You can export images with transparent backgrounds on the Mac today. Unfortunately, it isn't easy for us to support the same on Windows at this time.

john
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@fuzzion said:

@jbacus said:

We are hiring Software Engineers in Boulder, if you'd like to apply:

What I mean Jbacus, is that YOU should handpick some of our top plugin makers that show desire to innovate and propel by personally sending an Email to those that you think have talent. Remember, most of the Industries gifted programmers are either drop outs or self taught Geniuses

I.e. Bill Gates,John Carmack, etc.

For what it is worth, I don't have a Phd in CompSci either... I have an BArch from Cooper Union and an MArch from Rice University. The SketchUp team is populated by a wide range of folks with unusual backgrounds by Google standards– Lighting, structural and architectural engineers are much more common on our team than pure CompSci folks. No need to argue the merits of looking for talent outside the box to me.

Historically, we have brought on gifted Ruby developers (remember Dynamic Components?) who came up with cool add-ons for SketchUp. We may do it again in the future if that is the most efficient way to launch new features that we think everyone will benefit from having in SketchUp.

john
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We are hiring Software Engineers in Boulder, if you'd like to apply:

@cadmunkey said:

On both installs I did over the weekend (1 desktop, 1 laptop) Windows popped up a message saying that sketchup did not install properly and had applied compatibility settings to it. Anyone else get this? I'm not sure how to check what settings have been applied just in case this has an impact SUs performance. I dont want to run any program under any kind of emulation mode.
Both machines have 64bit Win7 installed. Any ideas?

Could you post a screenshot of the message? Probably just means that you're running SketchUp in 32bit mode on your 64bit system. There's no harm in that (no impact on performance). Though I'm sure someone will jump in here to ask when we're going to release that 64bit version of SketchUp so you don't see this message on install

john
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@pixero said:

But is it more stable for "polygon heavy" models?
I'd rather have a slow but stable SU than a fast and unstable.
Do you mean that a 64bit SU wouldn't be more stable for heavy models?

New releases of SketchUp tend towards increased stability. I say that they "tend towards" increased stability because new major versions may be less stable than the preceding maintenance release for the last major version– actually, that's the whole reason for doing maintenance releases. We track "stability" metrics by watching submitted crash reports– so be sure that you're sending those reports in if you're having problems.

Unfortunately, as SketchUp's performance and stability increase you are at liberty to make larger and more complex models. Which put new and more taxing requirements on the system as a whole.

But, no– 64bit computing won't inherently improve the stability of SketchUp for large models.

john
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@jason_maranto said:

I do wonder if some very real performance gains could be made by overhauling the internal render engine, because that seems to be the thing that slows down performance the most.

We implemented an entirely new rendering engine in SU7.1, which did increase performance significantly. Historically, every new SketchUp release is faster than its predecessor.

john
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@numerobis said:

yes, 64bit support would be really helpful! but the statements from JBacus didn't look very promising...

In what way would 64bit support be really helpful? For your reference and others, here is one of the better discussions we've had the topic so far.

This stuff is difficult to understand. I don't think we're beating a dead horse if there are still misconceptions floating around the community about the real benefits of 64bit computing.

john
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@adamb said:

There is no silver bullet here. There is just one - and only one - way of solving the issue and that is to keep a fat, easy-to-edit format as primary data and cache lean, fast-to-draw versions of it. What method you choose to use for this is, as they say, an exercise for the reader.

Right... well put, Adam.

john
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@kydbmaster said:

I am wondering if the xFrog programing library could be incorporated in to SU perhaps as a SU plug-in so that organic models would change in complexity as you zoom in and out and as a user moves closer to organic models in SU.

Fundamentally, the xFrog library is automatically creating multiple geometric LoD's (Levels of Detail) and swapping them in and out of the model as the camera position changes. This is possible primarily because xFrog models are so parameterized to begin with. Unfortunately, SketchUp models aren't parameterized in the same way– which means that the xFrog library doesn't provide a solution that would be of any benefit to SketchUp users.

john
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Hi guys,

Please don't be confused- this is not a Google product, nor was the SketchUp team involved in it in any way.

John
.

Hi guys,

The problem in this case is figuring out where the 'new' toolbar should be added. I don't have my PC in front of me at the moment, but I think new Ruby toolbars are added at the start of the toolbars, not at the end. On the other thread on this subject (over at our help forum) a suggestion was made that new Ruby toolbars should be floated on first load to avoid this.

john
.

Comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

john
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@xennon said:

This is incredible ... this thread alone has been going since Apr 2008 ... more than 30 months and STILL no resolution to the extremely annoying issue. Version 8 has now come out and guess what - I STILL DOES IT!!.

While it is clear that you're not impressed with our improvement (for those who've missed it so far, we're also discussing this on the SketchUp Help Forum), I'm curious to know if it had any impact on the workflow of other folks here on SCF?

The basic problem is that folks with more than a dozen Ruby extensions (I ran into someone yesterday who had over 200 of them installed at once... whoa!) are overwhelming our simple MFC toolbar implementation. It just can't scale to that kind of usage. To make things work better, we'll have to stop using Microsoft's toolbars and write our own. That isn't a trivial project, unfortunately– we could do it, but it would mean not doing something else.

@xennon said:

OMFG - What does it take for goooooooogle to pull their finger out and address this problem?

As I said over at our forums, being civil will make it much more likely that discussion of the actual problems at hand will occur. I'm quite willing to discuss these sorts of issues, but find it easier to do when folks are being polite.

john
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Thanks, Tom- very helpful. I'll pass the offending object on to our testing folks to see if they can reproduce your problem in the lab.

john
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