What’s up with SketchUp Make?

If you what you say is true, lets do this in the open and assume nothing.
Put it to all the plugin and extension developers and start a tread to see
if it is the case.

In the short term I agree the dumping of SketchUp Make will probably not affect the sales of my plugins. However, if you look at the long term and the effect this will have on SketchUp then yes it will affect me as a developer.

People need the ability to do “real work” with SketchUp at an amateur level, at some point some of those people will become Pro customers.

I still think the right thing to do is to offer Make at a reasonable price, this would be a win-win for everyone.

7 Likes

Gave up on the shop systems that use Win 10 and have NVIDIA graphic accelerators.

Trying it out now on the main server that has Win 7 and a quad core i7 3.2 Ghz with a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ video adapter.

The delays are intolerable between actions to the point I’m not able to use the SketchUp Free when the vector counts

get too large. I’m able to work with a couple hundred polygons but as I approach four figures I start getting the errors and

the by the time I’m at 4 to 5,000 polygons the interactive delays are upwards of 5 to 10 seconds, and I get the following constantly.

sketchup.com is not responding due to a long-running script.” I next pulled in a 10,000 plus polygon design and I now not able to

save or work at all on IE, Chrome, or FireFox. If I’m to promote this to students and fellow wood workers we will not be able to create

3D objects and STLs with very much detail. I tested my internet speed throughout the session and found it to be at 67 to 150 Mbps

down and 5 to 15 Mbps up. I also reviewed the add-on that are active in all three browsers. The only one that I have active is the

Shockwave Flash Object from Adobe systems “Enabled”.

1 Like

There have been a few people on here thinking that Sketchup Free needs a really fast connection. Admittedly you will need a reasonable speed and it will have to be available whenever you want to use Free. The delays I see are not waiting on anything downloading. They are waiting on the program running. It uses quite a lot of CPU time for me, especially when starting up. I have quite a fast internet connection, just tested at 165Mbps down, 10Mbps up but find it hard to see much activity there when Sketchup Free is starting up. I think it peaked at 8Mbps once, but most times its hardly downloading anything at all. It is possible that it is waiting on downloading if Sketchups servers are struggling.

My CPU usage is noticable though. I get 1285% (using 13 virtual cores out of 16) for about 5 seconds, then settles down to just over 100% for the rest of the start up time. Even once I’m able to start modelling, it stays at 100% for a while, then settles down to almost nothing, like 5% even while modelling.

My GTX 970 graphics card isn’t working hard either, barely hitting 20% processor usage and about the same for its RAM.

Performance isn’t too bad at all for me. @mjeanson said it struggled with a model with 10,000 polygons so I tried one of my files which has over 1,000,000 edges and 525,000 faces. It is pretty slow to load, but once I’d got zoomed in to the model, it was quite usable, especially turning off the layer with the most polygons in it. It is much slower than Sketchup Pro on my Mac and also slower than the Sketchup viewer on my iPhone 6 which is a bit sluggish with this file but not as bad as Sketchup Free.

I’m using Safari 11.0.1, Mac OS X 10.11.6 on an 8 year old Mac Pro with 2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Xeons, 48GB RAM, GTX 970 4GB.

for me, SU Free only works using the ‘Developer Preview’ of Safari 11.0.2 [ I’m not sure when it goes ‘public’ ]…

it uses a lot more cpu than SU desktop…

john

Have you read through this thread detailing the issues with the select tool and how to fix it?

Hi Joe. We’re paying attention, don’t worry :slight_smile:

I hope so. You should know that SketchUp Make and Pro are products we all love and want to see succeed. SketchUp for Schools may prove to be a good educational tool. But SketchUp Free, in my opinion, will get no traction without extensions and even then the cloud will probably limit it. Just trying to help.

Joe…

1 Like

There have been some very interesting and derogatory comments in this thread. I have been very hesitant to add anything. While I too am kind of disappointed in the enhancements (?) in the last couple of releases, I do have to add one VERY positive comment (IMHO). The performance improvement I am experiencing is VERY much appreciated for me. I am seeing the following things that I really like:

  • I have some rather complex models (at least in my opinion - lots of faces) that have had a significant lag when orbiting them. In the 2018 version, I am not seeing any lag at all.

  • 2018 is loading much faster for me. In general, I would estimate that it is starting up 3 to 4 times faster.

  • When I have sent models over to LayOut in the past, I have seen a degradation in the way dimensions were displayed in LayOut. With 2018, I am seem them back to the way I want them to show up and they way they used to (prior to 2017).

  • It also appears to me that my models are loading in LayOut much faster.

To me, these things are VERY POSITIVE and I feel that I would be remiss in not passing along my appreciation to the performance improvements. :grinning:

1 Like

I’m still catching up on this thread and plan to post my own thoughts/suggestions, but I just wanted to chime in here because this is the first mention of Customized Keyboard Shortcuts. I agree that this is essential for the web-version. Without getting too far into it right here, I’ll just saw that the closer the web UI and functionality is to the desktop version, the better (for numerous reason).

1 Like

To get customizable keyboard shortcuts for an app, one has to work around the browser shortcuts. This Discourse forum has shortcuts. Type Shift + / in this forum to see an overlay listing the keyboard shortcuts for this forum.

Chrome has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. The easiest way to see all of them presented - and how they can conflict with SU shortcuts -can be seen using a slick feature in a Chromebook. Ctrl + Alt + / will display a keyboard overlay with shortcuts highlighted, and the user can press Shift, Ctrl, Alt and combinations of those modifiers to see shortcut assigned to assorted keys on the keyboard. Most of the letters are available, but many keys modified with Ctrl and Alt are taken by the Chrome browser. I’m sure there are many shortcuts with the other browsers.

To keep all the default desktop SU shortcuts, the browser shortcuts have to be disabled for the SU web app tab because there are some conflicts.

There are many desktop SU shortcuts that work in SU Free, but some do not do to conflict with browser shortcuts. The Discourse shortcut overlay mentioned above is useful. And the snazzy, interactive Chrome OS keyboard overlay is nicer. SU Free should add something like it,. Of course, that applies to pre-assigned shortcuts. I still want to customize.

1 Like

I wish Trimble would consider something less than pro, more than browser-make free.
As a retired hobbyist I can’t afford or justify the cost for Pro, and without Ruby or plug-ins Sketchup Free is simply too limited.

Oh, well. In a year or two I suspect almost all software will be browser or cloud based, the rest will be confined by ever more restrictive and sandboxed OSs to approved app-store-only installs. Great, until the power goes down.

2 Likes

This is like a great benefactor giving out free pizza to hungry people for years and then suddenly giving them bread instead. Are the people entitled to complain if they never paid in the first place? I’m happy to pay the PRO licence fees for an outstanding product that we have started to take for granted…

5 Likes

Loosing power will cause serious troubles already, which is why I always have a candle, a notebook and some pencils :slight_smile:
Loosing connection, however, is worse, according to my 15 year old daughter, who has almost finished watching Youtube, having seen it all…

3 Likes

If you’re ona laptop you can survive a few hours without power though :stuck_out_tongue: .

Thanks for a few good years. I am retired and use this for my woodworking hobby but without the woodworking extensions it would be much harder. I can’t justify the cost for pro so I will use Make 2017 for a year or so and then it will become out of date and problematic like all applications, so I need to get out my sketchpad and start drawing again. Not a bad thing because I can now spend my time and money on wood and stop playing on these computers - as it should be. Was nice for awhile. Toorah

1 Like

What makes you think SketchUp 2017 Make will stop working in a year? There are still many users using SketchUp 8 which was replaced five years ago. I’m not trying to talk you out of using paper and pencil. Go for it if you want. But SketchUp 2017 Make won’t just shut down on you in a year or two years.

1 Like

Thanks. In my experience I have had other applications start to error out after awhile as a result of new operating systems and hardware. Its good to know that your application has not got a history of this and its to your credit. That being said the writing is on the wall and it’s just best to be prepared.

After looking at this lengthy thread, I will put my rambling 2 cents worth. First, how I got here. I am currently retired. I have always had an intrest in drafting. I used several free apps in the late 90’s up until about 2010. I had been on the look for better apps but did not want to pay the money for them. They seemed buggy and lacking for the money. My daughter was in college and I asked if her were any cad programs in the student bookstore. I scored a student version of AutoCAD for $200. I used that for my needs until I wanted to get into 3D. With the online help and tutorials I could not figure out how to make it work, even with following along while watching it. And oh the student version was not to be used for commercial. When printed it had a border around it announcing it was a student version. Late into '16 I stumbled onto SU and tried the free trial and was hooked. I bought Pro. For my limited usage being without Layout was not an option at that time, still isn’t. Style Builder is something I have not even tried to explore. My drawings are becoming more complicated as time passes. The web version of make would not suit my current needs. The marketing people need to figure out what the market will bear and how to milk it. Realistically I would pay for Layout as an add-on to the non-web based SU. As far as support goes the forum and tutorials from Trimble as well as what is on the web cover my needs. Most apps have free support until the next major update and offer premium support for a fee. For my use I would be willing to pay $250.00 for a package of SU and Layout with no maintenance fee for a 1 year period with the ability to up grade to the next version at a steep discount. As far as extensions go I use 2 that are from the warehouse, both free. SU is something I may not use for a month at a time. Realistically as the year has passed the only reason for the current maint. agreement is to get the next upgrade, as I see it. For my usage it was not worth the money but I will take the '18 version and not renew the agreement.
Thanks for the space to rant. BTW this took about 40 minutes to put down, fat slow fingers on the kb. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’ve changed hardware several times and migrated to Windows 10 from Windows 7. I have 8 versions of SU on my computer and they all work just fine. SU 7, 8, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. I require them merely for testing since I am a Plugin developer. I have a C++ compiler that I use for additional developement. It came out in 2002 and still compiles just fine.

In my experience (at least with Windows), the majority of my old programs run great. I can even run old DOS programs dating back to the 1980’s.

Some of the newer programs require certain hardware capabilities - So some of the newer programs will not run properly on old hardware.

2 Likes