SP3 Coming to a desktop near you soon!

Dave Simeone announced today (during the weekly civil 3d webcast) that there is indeed a SP3 for Civil 3D coming out in late October, probably early Novemeber.  What’s in it?  Why does it matter?  2 main goals with this service pack; 1 – restore data shortcut functionality & 2 – improve program speed/efficiency.

1 – Data shortcuts were the “project” solution in C3D 2006.  As you may know, Vault is now that solution.  As a result up til now, data shortcuts were still functional, but xm files had to be manually reloaded into a reference drawing each time.  In SP3, the xml file will reload automatically upon file open, thereby rebuilding any objects based on the xml file.  There’s more to this process, but the largest stumbling block was to always reload the xml file manually each time you opened a drawing.  Kudos to Manchester (the civil3d team in Manchester, NH) for throwing firms a bone when Vault wasn’t their answer.

2 – Speed / memory – Surfaces are managed more efficiently in RAM, supposedly giving a 2x increase in processing speed.  Also, building / rebuilding corridors has improved processing by 50x.  The caveat here is that I will be testing the beta version of SP3 over the next few weeks to validate the claims, so stay tuned.   If the demo they showed during today’s webcast was any indication, those improvement estimations shouldn’t be a problem.

This beta is very public, Autodesk wants many people to “beat” on the service pack to resolve lots of issues noted in the readme file.  If you’re interested, signup and use FenwaySP3Beta in the beta code field.

Enjoy your weekend!