Why does Inventor have so many glitches?

[Anonymous]

Why does Inventor have so many glitches?   I've been using the program for approx 15 years, 8 to 9 hours a day (always with the most current version).  Over that span of time, the program seems riddled with problems about 5 to 10 percent of the time.  Every year at release time, the program crashes repeatedly.  I currently have 32GB of Ram which should allow the program to do some temporary backup/save and some error handling, BUT NO, it just crashes and leaves the screen. This release, the IDW is NOT Updating changes made to IPT and IAM parts.  The horizontal and vertical constraints are reversed about 50% of the time in the last 2 years.  There are other numerous glitches which will go unspecified here.   

When I see users on the forum voice these type of opinions, it is often insinuated that the user is the problem or that the issue is an isolated incident (so far out of main stream and no one else is experiencing any problems).  These types of programs are powerful and can be fun to use when they are working.  My hats off to the programmers for those good times, but WHY, oh why can't the program be fixed?  I'm assuming when Inventor abandoned VBA years ago that the entire program was revamped from the ground up, but the same problems keep showing up with every release.

Dave

[smokes2998]

I already knew that but you probably don't deal with stuff that is complicated and  and sketches overlaying other features.and the horizontal and vertical and be difficult to see when you project the planes through them. 

[PaulMunford]

Fusion 360 also only has one Horizontal/vertical constraint tool. It automatically picks whichever is closet for you, and it seems to get it right!

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Paul,

There is definitely room for improvement in Inventor Sketch workflows. I am more familiar with INV than F360 so I cannot comment on the difference and the ability. I Inventor uses the industry standard DCM sketch solver for 2D sketch. I was told that F360 uses a different sketch solver. It would not surprise me if there are behavioral differences between the two.

Many thanks!

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Brian and Curtis,

You guys are too kind. I got more credits than I deserve. Although I have good batting average, I still miss miserably from time to time. Human multi-threading errors and memory corruption are happening to me more than before.

Regarding the sketching related discussion, it is probably one of the most complained behaviors in Inventor I must say. There are multiple issues here: undesirable view rotation, Y-axis being up by default, the the sketch normal default direction, and face-based coordinate system determination.

I am not going to discuss too deep in each, since it can be confusing and it will not help users understand the issue better or get better results. This is why I simply ask if the orientation in Standard (DIN).ipt is more desirable. If it is, it is pretty easy to change a template ViewCube orientation. I am more than happy to show you how to do that.

We have done some research in this area and we have good ideas about how to change it. We just have not found a good timing to do so.

Many thanks!

[smokes2998]

Re orientating the template does not fix the legacy behaviour though.......

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! Yes, you are right. Changing default up-direction in the template or a given iam/ipt file does not resolve all the issues in this thread. It only helps resolve the need to have Z-axis pointing upward (top). Other requests will require code change which is not easily resolved by changing the template.

As I mentioned before, the undesirable behaviors are quite complicated. I do not want to give you false hope that they can be resolved as a bug fix. They simply cannot be. They require thorough research and careful implementation to get the desirable results. We want to make sure any new behavior is absolutely better than the legacy behaviors. Otherwise, we fail.

Many thanks!