Update previous versions of revit

[Anonymous]

I am sure this is a waste of my time and effort but intrigued to see if others want the functionality.

As architects rarely upgrade their models to the latest version of Revit when a project transference from concept to reality (for quite understandable reasons), both them and those of us working with them are often working on older versions of Revit (currently 2016 is the most common I use with occasional use of 2015 & 2017 - we have yet to receive a project in 2018 and haven't even bothered to download 2019 yet!).

This means that any shiny new features released in 2019 will eventually be useful to me in about 3 - 4 years time, surely Autodesk can tell which versions of Revit are in common use and a regular release of useful features to older versions would be very welcome (although admittedly extremely unlikely).

Telling everyone they should be using the latest version is a lovely idea but that is all it is, it is never likely to be reality!

Now for a really radical idea, stop releasing a new non backwards compatible version every year and concentrate on getting your current version as near perfect as possible 

[sasha.crotty]

I am archiving this idea in an attempt to be fully transparent.  I totally appreciate the request and I would LOVE it if it were possible to make all features available to every version. Unfortunately it's not practical for two reasons:

1. Most improvements to Revit require a change to the data stored in the file. If we fixed our file format we would be limited to very topical improvements. You can read more about why backwards compatibility is not something that can really be accomplished here.

2. It is very time consuming and error prone to integrate significant changes into previous versions due to the living nature of code. This means that development teams would spend a lot of time pushing changes to old versions and testing them instead of actually improving the product.

That said, I want to point out that we actually already do what is being requested here to the best of our ability. Projects that are compatible with previous versions and completed on a time-frame that allows it are shipped in point releases (see releases like 2018.1-2018.3, 2019.1, etc).  I actually considered marking this issue as "Implemented" however I do realize that would not be in spirit with the request. We underestand that it's often hard to upgrade so we do our best to make things available to as many people as possible. We are also looking at ways to make upgrade easier, so that this becomes less of an issue in the long run.