RISA 3D V 18 Specific Complaints 10

These are the impressions and the frustrations of 'an old hand' on using RISA 3D V 18 (new risa) for a month now. If it is true that old risa was the most popular frame-analysis program in the USA, then I would say that new risa has done great harm to our profession. The old risa was straightforward, sensible, intuitive, and user-friendly. New risa is none of these things and seems to have been programmed not to make a successful program better or maximize ease-of-use, but ‘change for the sake of change’ (and maximize the number of clicks to boot). The new version has absolutely no regard for engineers who know old risa well – they threw our knowledge into the trash and gave us a shiny new POS that takes us hours and days of wasted time to figure out. In the past month new risa has taken more then twice the time that old risa used to take.
I can’t believe the stupidity of software hiding things and forcing engineers to ‘hunt and peck’ click and click just to accomplish what used to take one click. The hiding of menus and lack of expansion of same, the lack of obvious important buttons is really dumb given the larger screen areas that we have now compared to older computers. Old risa fit many more useful buttons on smaller screens and didn’t ‘bury’ items in menus. It may be elegant in a phone to not know how or where to turn the thing on, but in frame-analysis it is maddening, and if it’s also expensive (as new risa is), you are paying for a mediocre, frustrating to use POS (piece of software). Enough for now, more specific comments later.

 

[jayrod12]

I'm going to chime in here after just lurking for a while, I'm a mid-late 30s engineer with 13 years of using RISA.

Although I tend to agree with many of the comments/complaints made so far, I do feel that some of them are a personal preference thing (most but I agree with many).

One thing I do not want to happen is the last comment. I do not want to see the program automatically show the loads for the combination being solved. I also do not find an issue with having the support reactions shown via clicking through the view tab. But I do agree that the changes were too much too fast and they've pretty much crammed them down ever user's throats.

Luckily for me, I happened to have V17 and V18 running side by side as I was one of the firsts to complain about how unusable V18 was at first release. I have maintained the dual installs.

I do find when I need to do something really quick, say a single beam, or a single frame, I still default to using V17 because I am more comfortable with it.

However, when I'm doing a new larger project that may be touched by other users, I try to use V18 (soon to be V19?).

I sure hope there aren't the errors in design checks in V19 that plagued V18 for the first few releases.

 

[dauwerda]

I have installed v19 and started using it after going back to 17 a few days after trying out 18 - there were way too many bugs at the beginning of 18 in my opinion.

One of the first things I noticed was that the graphics just didn't seem to draw my attention to the "thing of interest". For example, if I opened the node coordinates box it seemed to just get lost on the page and not pop out at me as I would like. However, I switched the modeling space color from white to black and this seemed to help a bunch - it still seems to be missing something visually to me that other programs all have, but I can't put my finger on what it is (it might be that everything is sharp edges and corners and there is no shading and rounding that helps the eye move from one visual to the next).

I haven't looked into it yet, but I am really hoping we will be able to customize the ribbon.

 

[JMarker941]

-to other posters, welcome aboard! It's great to see other opinions about this subject.

Item 8. Settings.
This just in: the Settings menu has been found again after being lost for about 5 weeks. In old risa these settings were in a more obvious place, ie, under the Tools tab on the ribbon. Click on the FILE tab, and then go down to Application Settings (and not to beat a dead horse butt, are there any non-applicable settings?). If you want to change the screen colors, you will find this under the General tab, and then the Advanced button (which has a couple of Graphic Options which hopefully are also shown closer to the Print Report function).

I'd like to know at this point if there is some kind of prohibition against showing important information in 2 different places (say in the same place as old risa did, and the new place in risa that takes an egg-hunt to find). On my screen, the existing tabs FILE, HOME, MODIFY, etc take up only 33% of the available space, so all the old risa favorites Global, Units, Tools, etc, could easily be shown for us Neanderthals. What I would really like to see is one big button labeled SETTINGS that would show every possible setting in a stacked view now buried in and under various hard-to-find menus.


To answer a previous query, I still haven't found the 'Customize Toolbar' option which was listed under Tools in old risa.

Let's end this with compliments to whoever pushed through showing those little model views in Recent Projects. It would really be nice to have these shown in Open project mode also . .

 

[JoshPlumSE]

I can give a little insight into the "Application Settings" concept. My belief is that it was moved this way because they wanted to be consistent with what other programs do.... Word, Excel, etc. Settings that affect the program as a whole tend to go there.

That's essentially the same concept as Tools - Preferences that used to exist in older versions of RISA.

Note that it changed to Tools - Application Settings (Preferences) at some point in the last few versions of the old RISA.... Finally an example of RISA doing the "incremental changes" for which I have been an advocate.

Also note that the term "application" is just another term for "program". So, it could also be called "program settings". Again, this is differentiated by the fact that they apply to the whole program and multiple models. As opposed to model settings (Global) which is applicable only the the one model you have open.

 

[JMarker941]

Item 9. Old RISA files.
This may not apply to everyone who doesn't have a couple thousand old risa files laying around the office collecting dust until someone walks in and wants to re-use one of them. [hint to new risa users: it is a lot easier to open old files and molest them rather than set up a completely new file - just be sure to save your changes to a new file name.]
On too many occasions when I have tried to open an old file I receive this cryptic message: "Object reference not set to an instance of object". Wat?? ok then, how do I reset my object references? *crickets*

 

[JoshPlumSE]

JMarker -

You have to send those models into RISA/Nemetschet. In my opinion, that type of error message is unacceptable. The error message needs to have meaning to the users, not just the developers.

If you send it in, then they should be willing to fix this to give a reasonable message. Unless things have changed a lot since I left.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

Heck, you might even post one of those old files that gives this message on this forum. I'd be happy to take a look at it to see if I can understand why it's giving that message. If there is something damaged or corrupted with that file, I might be able tell.

 

[JMarker941]

Thank you Josh - now that I think about it, the data-base has been copied so many times it's probably corrupt as you say.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

Even so, the error message needs to be better.

I usually considered it a "failure" if we had to run the file with the program in "debugger" mode in order to figure out where the issue was that was causing the error message.

 

[lufegame]

I have read the previous post and I feel sorry about Josh left RISA. I am an older user of the program under Mr. Bates (I have release 14, I think is the last one of him and his crew), not sure.
I used to be a dealer in my country and I really love the old way of RISA. Easy to use, practical, good help (you know what the program does mostly). I have a big project and was thinking to buy a subscription of the new RISA, but reading these posts...I will rethink it.
I never met you JoshPlumSE, but I respect the work done in RISA and feel sorry and concern about what software I will use in the future, seems is time to change.

 

[bones206]

With respect to the "Object reference not set to an instance of object" error, I just got the same error while using Bluebeam. So it may be more of a Microsoft issue...

 

[jayrod12]

Except bluebeam and Risa are now both Nemeschek, so it could potentially be an issue with the way something is done internally on their programs. I haven't yet come across such an error in either program.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

Lufengame - Thanks for the kind words. I loved helping the RISA users. You guys were great people to work with / work for.

Regarding the "Object reference not set to an instance of object": My guess is that this is a generic error that is spit out by the programming language / compiler that was used to build the program. The best way to handle these things (from a user friendly point of view) is to "intercept them" before the user sees them and provide a better error message. Though I'm not a programmer and I don't know exactly what's happening or how it can be fixed, I have to believe that if you were to report this to RISA then they would do something about it.

I wouldn't hold my breath about BlueBeam though, in order to fix these types of errors you need a way to consistently reproduce them. Like when you open a particular model and it happens every time.

 

[German Shabanin]

Dear JoshPlumSE.
You are the most dedicated member of the RISA team (in the past). I admire you!
You are absolutely right, it is quite easy to catch a program error (C# try {// Do something} catch (Exception e) {// Do something} finally {// Do something} )...
You (developer team) just need to have a desire.
RISA 3D .Net (last version) - excellent program.
Best regards to All.

 

[Killstadogg]

What frustrates me is how much slower the UI is. Entering nodes was nearly instantaneous in v17. Now in v18/v19 it stutters when you add nodes, records to spreadsheets, etc. This drives me crazy and breaks up my train of thought. Everything else about the UI seems like a huge upgrade in my opinion. Am I the only one who feels this way? RISA really needs to focus on fixing the speed issues of the UI. I don't know the inner workings but I suspect lazy coding using databases. I suggest dealing with objects that react to changes quickly then have them sync the database up in the background.

 

[German Shabanin]

If Builders Built Buildings the Way Programmers Wrote Programs, Then the First Woodpecker That Came Along Would Destroy Civilization

Gerald M. Weinberg (

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg)