The Extensions are very useful & I have a few I use quite a lot, your ones are excellent & mainly for countries where the timber frame house market is single walled stud panel open frame with various claddings/sidings. PLUS-SPEC wall tools have the ability to form cavity wall construction with a cavity & an outer leaf in brick or rendered blockwork. This was of particular interest to me as UK based & we seem to build most of our homes with cavity wall construction.
I did buy PLUS-SPEC in the early days & it is a great product, however subscription-based software (renting not owning) doesn’t sit well with me & when Extensions cost more than the host product, it’s a big NO for me.
Extensions per-se do compete with each other quite a lot, but all quite unique, some free & some paid for. I’ve not thought about a larger player entering the SU-Extension market & developing a SUPER-BIM architectural tool set.
The development cost may outway the extension cost, for me, it would have to be a perpetual licence & not more than 50% of the host software.
Another factor is confidence of your investment, i.e. how long in time will a third-party product be supported yearly & work with SU-PRO’s yearly updates ? For this reason alone, I wouldn’t invest my time in costly extensions, I would want these to be part of the programme.
Last year my cabinet making plugin required 1 line of code change to allow for the new htmldialog vs the older webdialog. The plugin still worked with SU 2019 - it just wouldn’t let you use the faster htmldialog.
The point is - I am not worried in the least about Future Proofing my plugins because from year to year they just work.
I recently had feedback that my SimpleDXF didn’t work on a Mac. Turns out the Sketchup ruby api is wrong and has been wrong for Macs as it pertains to openpanel and savepanel. Now that it is fixed - It should work on a Mac for a long long time.
The point I am making is that at least some of the developers can produce very robust code.
All of my plugins made the jump from 2018 to 2019 without a single line of code changing. The only problem I am having currently is supporting MacOS and its problem with modal windows. I am also still supporting as far back as SU 2015.
What you are willing to pay for a product should not be factored on what other software cost but how much revenue it will bring you. If you use a particular software how much time will it save you versus not using it. That should be the driving factor as to whether that software is worth the money.
The percentage at which a software justifies itself is an interesting question to be sure. If a piece of software will save (make) me $10,000 in a given year is it worth paying a $1,000 subscription for it? How about $100,000 in savings. I’m curious as to what percentage most design professionals would consider reasonable or acceptable. I do think that this number will also be somewhat influenced by what crowd your talking to (ie. AutoCad, ChiefArchitect or SketchUp users).
I think your last point would be in an ideal world scenario, however not all can afford or willing to pay unreasonable costs for software no matter how time saving they may be.
Hi Donney Clark,
I think you’re not quite getting this thread, inferring I think Medeek’s Plug-in’s aren’t affordable. This of course was not so, it was generalising about a larger fictional developer, company I guess, developing a SUPER-BIM architectural tool set & those potential costs & processes.
I was wanting/trying to give a little bit of input because I was worried by miscommunication/misunderstanding.
The company I work for has purchased the mdkBIM suite before it was the mdkBIM suite. I saw the Medeek Wall plugin in a video about 6 months ago, then I talked with my boss about all three (3 at that time) Medeek plugins. I feel that the Medeek plugins are a better return on investment and have more potential compared to other extensions.
IMHO, it seems like some of the recent posts would be better suited for the Medeek BIM thread.
I’ve been putting out a few fires the last couple of days and one thing that I would like to provide some clarity on is the current system that handles custom data from the User.
Specifically I am talking about wall presets, custom materials and custom headers.
Currently this user generated data/settings is stored within the plugin subfolder within the following three sub-folders: preset, library_mats, library_headers. Within each of these sub-folders is a simple text file that acts as the database and where all of the parameters are actually stored.
When the plugin is uninstalled SketchUp deletes the entire plugin subfolder and hence any custom settings stored in these files/folders are removed as well. The long term solution to this problem is to store this information in a folder that is outside of the plugin folder itself (change up the way the plugin is storing this information). The short term solution is to simply copy these three sub-folders to a different location (back them up) and then uninstall the existing plugin and then reinstall the new version. Once the upgrade is complete then you can simple drop the contents of the backed up sub-folders into the plugin sub-folders overwriting the (default) config files and you get all of your wall presets and custom materials and headers back.
Can framing be added to wall assemblies created with LT version of plugin if edited with full version?
I am thinking that LT version would be good for design concepts, and then structural details could be added with full version later on.
Since only one gable wall type will be enabled. It has been nearly six months since I started working on the gable walls and unfortunately it has been quite a bit more complicated and problematic then I originally imagined.
Gable walls change up almost every aspect of the wall from connections to other walls to trim and wainscoting. The differences between rectangular walls and odd shaped walls is so drastic that I’ve basically had to write completely new modules for windows, doors, garage doors, trim, wainscoting, advanced options etc… its almost like there are two plugins running side-by-side.
To get to all the other gable variants is going to take some serious coding but the leap is less than from the initial leap from rectangular to gable so I am fairly optimistic that it will be manageable.
I’m going to do that and I will likely start a new thread with it. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to demonstrate it. I think it has to be a video and I haven’t done that before. I think I might ask Justin Geis the SketchUp Essentials guy.
