I just got an email from Bentley offering to let me try STAAD.Pro for free. This is funny because I've had STAAD.Pro forever. Anyway, one of the bullet points is "Run many design alternatives in parallel and display comparisons faster than ever before!" Does anyone know specifically what they are talking about? This would be nice because I'm often trying alternatives to how something is framed so I will save the .std file with a different name, say "Option 2.std", then change the framing, then see if it was actually an improvement. If it was I'll delete the original file then name Option2 whatever the original file name was. If it doesn't offer an improvement, I simply delete the Option2 and go back to my original file.
Have I been doing this the hard way?
That's a reference to Scenario Services. I understand from the Product Manager that this has evolved in the last couple of years since it was first introduced and should now be a good way to compare models or compare the same model across versions efficiently.
This seems a bit misleading to me. Scenario Services is a technology preview that is free for a limited time. Not part of STAAD per se but it uses STAAD to run the analysis in the cloud. I previewed this two years ago. Didn't really fit my needs at that time. I looked at it again this morning but couldn't figure out how to upload the STAAD file. I did notice though that the latest version of STAAD that it would use is 20.07.11.82. That seems very odd to me because I would have thought one of the advantages would be you could test the latest version before actually installing it.
Even though I never get replies from other users when I ask stuff as part of a reply, I'm going to try again. Has anyone tried Scenario Services? If so, what are your thoughts?
The latest STAAD engines are in testing mode and will be available by the end of this month. Will it be possible for us to have a quick chat with you to see exactly how you do comparison at this point ? If so, please email me directly at sam.mukherjee@bentley.com.