How do I pause or stop playback of the design history?

[donsmac]

I clicked to go back to to beginning of my design history and hit play. I was zoomed in on the model somewhat so I could not see it playing. I tried zooming out to get a view but discovered I could not do anything, except wait 15 minutes for it to play through. Anything I tried failed to stop the play back. There's no stop button or pause button so how do I stop or pause? If I wanted to stop at a certain point to grad a body for example to copy, how do I stop it from playing?

On top of that, I could not use the computer at all during that time because it would always jump back to Fusion if I hid it or went to another program. 

It's just something not implimented yet, right. 

[Cathy.Wang_Autodesk]

Thanks you very much to post the problem!

I'm sorry Fusion Timeline Play to occupy the computer.

I will transfer the requirement for Stop/Pause function on time to PD. PD will think about the functions in future plan.

I will also transfer the timeline issues to developers and they will try to fix them in a update.

Thanks

[odolyte]

1 year and several months and you still can't stop a playback !

Where is the play/pause bt please ??

[donsmac]

Hi Cathy, maybe you could update us on how that is going. Many here are trying to help you guys but it seems that these kinds of suggestions get lost in the wind. Does it really take that long to add a bit of code to stop the timeline playback. or any other seemingly simple idea that is suggested. Maybe there is something on your end that can be improved to allow for a faster turn around for this kind of thing. Does this really need to go to the idea station and get votes. The feedback from us to you guys is awesome but when it comes to us getting feedback from you guys, (aside from the interaction with you when we are helping with bugs), is somewhat lacking. Is there anything we can do to encourage you people to keep us in the loop. Does anyone know what's going on?

[TrippyLighting]

the Idea Station is the only "instument" we have at the moment, so I'd use it 😉

[Cathy.Wang_Autodesk]

Hi Dear,

It's correct, we need to put it on the IdeaStation, and if enough users think it is important, they will support it soon. Until then, this suggestion probably will not get implemented, as no one else has really asked for it.

Thank you!

[TrippyLighting]

Hi Cathy,

thank you for your contribution. My suggestion to put it on the Idea Station was to make sure all these suggestions get recorded there, not necessarily voted on.

Voting makes sense for some advanced features of for truly new stuff, but we should not have to vote for common sense!

Every other UI that has a play button that I have ever used, be it in software on in hardware, also has a stop button or a combined play/stop button. If models get more involved it is entirely unacceptable that a users machine is out of service for 15, 10, or even 5 minutes and does not react to user input.

Not reacting to user input is a bug as far as I am concerned.

[donsmac]

Hi Cathy, first of all thanks for replying, I'm going to make some valid points here so hold on. 

I find your response unacceptable if that is the position of AD. 

As Trippy points out quite clearly that every player since recorded time (excuse the pun) has a stop and pause button. I hope that Fusion's'  slogen of 'design different' doesn't mean just putting out  some unfinished half fast product and hope nobody notices.

I have put a number of ideas in the Idea Station so far and most of them are things that should already be in the product without the users having to suggest it at all, and have users vote on it. That's why I am saying something is wrong with the process. 

It's been my experience in the past in real life that the majority of people generally do not give a hoot even if the world is falling apart around them. As an example, I once told the superintendant of an apartment building to clean up around the buiding. It was covered wth garbage and broken glass and lots a children around in bare feet. His response to me was the same as yours, that I am the only one complaining about it. Another time I heard on the news about the biggest polluter of the St.Lawerence River. Their office was right across the street from where I worked so I phoned them up. I talked to the PR guy and he told me I was the only person who called to say something. 

I could go on but the point is I doesn't take more than one person to notice something is wrong. Why do we need to vote, seriously. Even the people who take time to read the ideas in the idea staion seem to have trouble taking an extra second it takes to vote on an idea that would make the product much better. I keep things simple and fundamental. But maybe those ideas are not sexy enough for people to vote on. 

I will make a new suggestion in the 'Idea Station' for now but let's try to work together to uncover the real problem here that causes the program to be .... the way it is now.

[Cathy.Wang_Autodesk]

Hi Dear users,

I appreciate your pertinent suggestion and your patient for our product. I can understand your feeling and your worry. Fusion team is working on making our product more perfect, we did lots of improvement on quality and performance or the near release. And we start to improve the user experience as well.

I will pass your suggestion to our PD and your suggestions are always very valuable for us. J

[jeff_strater]

Perhaps I can help explain the Fusion team's point of view on this - not this particular issue, but in general.  No one is saying that pausing playback is a bad idea.  It is not.  It's a fine idea.  Perhaps even an obvious one.  However, the problem that the Fusion team has is simply one of limited resources.  I'm engaged on another thread (turning-off-dimension-display-toggle), which is another one where the advocates find it hard to believe that such a thing would even be considered an 'improvement'.  I just checked on IdeaStation, and there have been, over time, over 2000 ideas cataloged there.  Some have been implemented, of course, but the number is still ballpark-accurate.  Most of those 2000 ideas are also good ones.

But, as much as I like to believe that the Fusion team is superhuman, we are not.  There are a finite number of people working on the planning, development, testing, documentation, and delivery of Fusion.  New capabilities such as this have to be thought out, implemented, tested, etc.  I could speak in some detail about the complexities of this particular suggestion (and would be happy to if anyone is interested), but the net result is that it would take resources to implement this.  And those resources are then not available for some of the other great ideas out there.  And so, we have to choose.  In addition to the 2000 ideas that our customers have suggested, we also have our own ideas of where the product should go.  All of that has to go into the hopper.  We highly value customer suggestions, believe me.  But, the reality is that all 2000 of those great ideas may not make it into Fusion.  So, we have tried to apply some criteria to help us.  IdeaStation votes is one of them.  Whether you agree or not, the number of people who are interested in a certain capability does factor in.  If 100 people vote for an improvement, it is more important than if only 10 do.  I'm not sure of any other mechanism we could use that would be reasonable.

Another aspect is the "how could you put out a VCR-style interface without a pause button?" aspect.  I agree, that this, at first, seems to be hard to comprehend.  But, in any product development (software or not), design tradeoff decisions have to be made along the way.  In this particular case, I personally was involved in this feature planning.  We obviously did discuss the ability to pause the playback during the original development of the timeline.  However, it's harder than it might at first seem.  So, we had a choice to make:  Should we scrap the entire playback mechanism until we can support pause during playback, or is there enough value there even without the pause?  We chose the latter.  You could argue that we made the wrong choice, but hopefully you can see that the answer is not quite so black-and-white as it first might seem.   I suspect that every product in history has had to make similar design decisions.

We sincerely appreciate the passion that you and all of our customers and forum contributors have for Fusion 360.  As Phil E. and I said in a talk we gave just this week at an internal Autodesk conference, in reference to the Fusion forum:  This passion shows that you care and want to improve Fusion.  If you didn't care, you would just stop using it.  So we appreciate these types of discussions.  I don't mean to discourage this at all, just want to try to shed some light on the tradeoffs that we make every day.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[TrippyLighting]

I agree with most of what you say, however there are a few things I'd like to provide a different perspective on.

Not all ideas are equal! Some ideas really adress essentials, roadblocks or severe obstacles that need to be addressed rather quickly. Some are minor considerations that are fairly quick to implement, some are large features that take months or even years to implement. Some ideas that have only 10 votes may actually are more importat than others that have many more votes because they address more advanced conept that a lot of the less experienced Fusion users don't grasp.

The topic on hand is NOT wheter there is a button or really how the inteface looks. The issue is that the software operates for 5,10 or 15 minutes and the operation cannot be aborted. Whether or not there is a button or you can simply press the Ecape key on your keboard does not matter but some mechanism should be provided. That about mechanism is also missing in other areas of Fusion.

I also went through the idea board and saw another idea  from @cekuhnen where it was requested to be able to abort the current calculation. Same problem and it has already 45 votes and is Accepted.

If you start connecting some of these ideas and group these in concetually similar area you can see a pattern. Perhaps then the simple minimum count of 10 required votes for a isolated idea is a somewhat obsolete concept.

Here is another example:

• Exit after upload; 39 Votes; Gathering Support
• Quit after upload button; 39 votes; Accepted

And another one:

• Sketching on curved surfaces; 37 votes; Under Review
  
• draw sketch on surface; 22 votes; Future Consideration

There are a number of others that I remember but don't have the specifics handy.

These are not separate ideas but elaborate on the same concept. If these are simply added up that may already provide a better guidance for priorities.

[donsmac]

Hi Jeff, 

Thanks for taking the time for the explanation. I think you should have just scrapped the whole idea of playing back the timeline and used that time to add something that is more useful and easier to implement. 

There are two features that would greatly improve the workflow that I am sure you could implement quite easily: 

1/ Add an option in the preferences to give the user a choice to stop the auto turning off of the sketch. That is the most annoying thing I find with the program. I do models with up to a thousand parts and it would save so much time if I did not have to keep going to the browser constantly to turn the sketch back on when I am not finished with it. It's much easier to turn it off manually when I'm done with it. And secondly, and probably more annoying then auto turning off of the sketch, is auto changing the operation from 'New Body' to 'Cut' or 'Join' in the dialogue boxes. Maybe 5 % of the time that is the desired operation but 95% of the time it is not. It just adds so many more mouse clicks, the opposite of what was intended in the first place. So again an option is needed in the preferences panel to turn that off. Both of those suggestions would be such a relief from constantly being tripped up by it. I'm sure the intension was to save mouse clicks but the exact opposite happens. The cut operation takes much more calculating as well so it is much slower than simply creating a new body. So I hope you understand what I'm saying here. I look forward to what you think of the idea. I can't even choose 'New Body' as an option in the dialogue box unless I first choose something else other than 'New Body' then choose 'New Body', then do the operation. Still faster most times to do that than waiting for the 'Cut' to take place then changing to 'New Body'. 

I think both of those suggestions ought to be fairly straight forward to implement. Please for the love of God. 

I do love the program and helping out others who are learning as I am. But I do have a lot of experience now in the Modelling environment of Fusion and can say without a doubt that these two suggestions alone would vastly improve the program in this area. 

Cheers 

~Don

[donsmac]

Hi Jeff again,

 I read your post several times trying to understand where the problem lies. I understand perfectly well your reasoning for not having a pause/stop button, but I don't understand why the playback of the timeline was implemented in the first place, does not seem like an idea worth adding considering the resources could have been focused on better things considering they are limited. The ideas I suggested in the Idea Station are things that would greatly improve the modelling workflow, getting rid of annoyances and key strokes. Not actually new features as such.

You stated that you are "not sure of any other mechanism we could use that would be reasonable." it seems there are several types or catagories of ideas being presented, 1/ new ideas for features such as Sheet Metal, Simulation, Dawings, CAM, etc, that kind of thing...  

2/ Improvements/expansions to existing tools, such as sketch on surface, a better loft, improved sketch functionality, adding origin planes to the mirror dialogue, putting all the fillets etc in the browser in a folder, etc that kind of thing....

3/ improvements to the modelling experience: getting rid of annoyances such as auto closing of the sketch, auto switching to 'Cut' or 'join' during operations, having a warning box saying that your sketch or body is invisible instead of simply having the program turn it on, having the background canvas rotate with the scene instead of remaining a background image etc...

4/ suggestions regarding bug fixing, too numerous to mention.

I would suggest that catagory 3 and 4 are the most important because they have the most impact on the user experience and are an indication of the degree of quality of the product and the care that the developers are putting into it. Such a product or tool for designers should have a high level of good design, well thought out and implemented. As it is now, it seems like the care is not there but rather the focus is on adding the big features, while disregarding the quality we as the users here feel should be there. That is why people are getting angry, upset, annoyed, whatever. and frustrated trying to get that simple message across. 

I really hope that helps you in understanding our position and hopefully incourages you to put some resources into the areas mentioned. It's for the benefit of all!

Thanks for the dialogue.

~Don

[sultan99]

Please remove play button, I always hit it accidently through negligence. Move the play function to Animation section.

[kenblu24]

Bumping the thread. It's been a year. Please, something should be done.

[brianrepp]

Hey @kenblu24 - the team is actively looking into a few short-term solutions for this and you can find additional details on the Ideastation item here: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/play-button/idi-p/6324303

[PhilProcarioJr]

@jeff_strater

Somehow I missed this discussion....anyways as I have dealt with the frustration of things like this in the past one comment you made got me thinking...

"We sincerely appreciate the passion that you and all of our customers and forum contributors have for Fusion 360.  As Phil E. and I said in a talk we gave just this week at an internal Autodesk conference, in reference to the Fusion forum:  This passion shows that you care and want to improve Fusion.  If you didn't care, you would just stop using it."

You forgot the huge point that comes with ("If you didn't care, you would just stop using it.") If your top users meaning the ones doing work that shows the world the true capabilities of your software, feel like they are not being listened to, they will stop using your software and eventually steer others away from it.

Just wanted to point that out.

[gruvin]

Good grief. This is not an, "idea". This is a report of severely broken functionality!

Enough of the apologetics already. What we NEED here is a way to reports BUGs, outside of of a full blown crash.

If I accidentally click that little play button on my current project (as happens FAR to often) then I get locked out of doing anything for a loooooooooooooooooooong time ... simply because it's a LARGE project and it takes a LONG time to finish playing.

Otherwise, OF COURSE, I'm lovin' everything about Autodesk's new direction and long may it thrive. 🙂

Bryan.

[HughesTooling]

When I was younger trying to fix motorbikes with my father and there was a badly designed part that was difficult to get apart or assemble he'd say who ever designed this should be made to take it apart and reassemble it 10 times a day until they come up with something that works. Well how about every night before anyone on the Fusion team can go home they open the largest design they have and press the play button, just for fun! You don't even need to add another button just let me press the Move to End button.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Please, could this update be fixed? I was just using the replay feature to understand someone else's project and I wanted to pause the replay to check how the feature they were using works. The issue of missing pause or exit buttons prevents me from using design history to understand a new file. Could a pause/exit button please be added to Fusion 360?