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Put out quarterly updates that include ideas and fixes so we know we are being listens to.
We all have heard the grumbling that no one is paying attention to civil3d and all resources are devoted to the cloud et al / infraworks.
Prove to us that you are listening: catch up on known defects and publish new ideas. There are plenty of code writers in the community that can pick up some slack (forgive me if I speak out of turn). Utilize your users for ideas and code if that helps.
Unfortunately change is a one way street with Autodesk. They want us to change, but they won't embrace Open Source Software for Civil 3D, a product they have largely abandoned. With an open source approach customers could pay third part developers to create features and then roll it into Civil 3D. Then Autodesk can maintain the yearly release of the software and customers get the features they need. Most Civil Engineer firms want to be engineers not software developers who then become responsible for maintaining the features. I know I miss out on a ton of work because the engineer firms don't want to maintain the code that I would write for them.
Take for instance the India requests for Section View point information showing in the bands. A fairly easy feature to write and implement. Do we really need to wait for a year for it to make into the product when it could be written in days, put out as a Civil 3D Productivity Tool and then rolled into the next release on the ribbon?
"With an open source approach customers could pay third part developers to create features and then roll it into Civil 3D."
"Most Civil Engineer firms want to be engineers not software developers who then become responsible for maintaining the features."
Open source isn't a magic wand solution. There are boatloads of problems with open source software as a paid-for application. One of the biggest is intellectual property rights. There have been issues where contributors demand payment, services be taken down/removed, etc. for their work (which may have been submitted inappropriately by another party). There are also legal agreements between AutoDesk and other developers whose work they license, which prevents them from sharing said code openly; open source agreements would require said code to be provided which cannot be done. Something of a related problem is one of legal accountability: if a project depends on software being technically accurate, and said software is a conglomeration of contributors, who gets held accountable? And what about confidentiality of future developments regarding a publicly held company? Its far, far easier to nix those problems out of the gate by staying with the traditional, closed-source paradigm.
Thats not to say such a project is impossible. If you feel that it is a good way to proceed, I highly encourage you start your own.
I don't quite think you got my meaning. The engineers would hire someone to do the feature, it would then be given to Autodesk who would then take over maintaining the feature within the software. If you look at the product a lot of it is already being done this way. 3am Solutions is writing a bunch of stuff for Autodesk:
I'm proposing it gets opened up to not only people/companies Autodesk is paying directly but to anyone with a feature.
The pain point isn't writing the feature, the pain point is maintaining the feature for each release.
"If a project depends on software being technically accurate, and said software is a conglomeration of contributors, who gets held accountable?"
Nobody currently stands behind Civil 3D or Infraworks, if you read the user agreement Autodesk isn't going to pay you for any damages because their product sucks.
"And what about confidentiality of future developments regarding a publicly held company?"
Autodesk likes to point to other companies when going to the cloud, many publically held companies have large open source products such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, etc... which is what I will point to here.
The entire product doesn't need to be open source to benefit from being open source. Autodesk can still hold their existing code as private. Any new features provided would be open and available. Similar to the way the Pipe Rules and Subassembly code is already provided with the shipped product.
I've already given tons of free open source stuff from my blog. I'm asking for the ability to add to the product instead of waiting for Autodesk to do features.
Take a look at Civil 3D 2017 as well as Productivity Pack 2 for Civil 3D 2016 and you should see that we continue to move forward with Civil 3D. We are moving towards a system of continous releases where additional features could be added to the software without a need to uninstall and reinstall a new package.
Keep the ideas flowing here on IdeaStation and keep voting on the ones that you want to see implemented.
Cheers,
Peter Funk Sr Product Manager Civil 3D Autodesk, Inc.
I am not sure exactly what Joe-Bouza meant with the original comment.
I interpreted it as meaning communication within the Ideas Forum.
Civil3D 2018 has been released recently. I found the new features help topic, but it does not list much. In terms of the Ideas Forums, I would like to see an Ideas posting that summarizes which issues that were addressed by the new release. Same for enhancements. It would be nice for those posting ideas to see that they are being addressed. AT least as far as Civil3d goes, Autodesk could still stand to improve communications.
