We recently received an email with respect to an update to the Bentley Support Policy. Many people in the office took this as a discontinuation of MXRoad but it is unclear if this is the case. However, we do note that MXROAD V8i (SELECTseries 4) will have "expiring support" from 1st July 2019 https://www.bentley.com/en/desktop-applications i.e. it will be unavailable for download and that "Connect Edition" and "Open Roads" will replace MXROAD. However, a lot of our designs use input files and we are concerned that this may not be supported. Having not used Open Roads, can you advise whether input file functionality is or will be available?
Hi Richard,
OpenRoads Designer is a completely new product. There is no linemode option within it. It does not use MX Commands.
You will still be able to use MX in the future, but it won't be developed any more, and we will still be providing support for the foreseeable future.
The intention is to transition users to ORD.
I'd be happy to discuss specific requirements, if you want to drop me an email. simon.pegg@bentley.com I'd be happy to discuss with you.
Simon Pegg
Bentley Civil Support
Agree with John Keating wholly! Used MX for nearly 30 years and is a proven tool for providing designs quickly. I am currently using it for all designs on one of the UK's maintenance contracts. For our work output, we have two options, either MX or Civil3D. I've use OpenRoads before and was too cumbersome, and at that time so full of faults that I understand it was abandoned in favour of Civil3D after I had left. By the looks of it, I will finally have to jump ship and go down the Autodesk route of products!
I think peoples perceptions of the software are down to past experiences. OR didn't perform for that job I worked on but Civil3D was used to complete it. On the other hand you used Civil3D successfully for council work, but not major highway work.
How are you finding OR with schemes of considerable length? What length are you dividing your schemes in to? References were a problem and took an age to load, and still attempting to load after they had been removed and the drawing purged. This was a major source of crashes. I'd be interested to know if this issue has been resolved.
definitely true...
We are now limiting our corridors and the design files more for the practicalities for multiple users working on a project vs. processing as we used to with the v8i OR version. Usually 2.5km performs pretty snappy.
We did a 30km Pacific Highway project in OR SS4 (in the MX environment), but started getting out of memory errors with too much processing and corridor lengths (but still delivered the project thankfully). This issue is now redundant due to the 64-bit nature of the new standalone ORD version and many of the legacy issues, like the one you mentioned, no longer exist since the software was rebuilt in the new standalone version. There are still some minor bugs that are annoying, but nothing close to what we had in the original versions...
Regards,
Mark
OpenRoads Designer 2022 R3 (10.12) | Microstation 2023 | ProjectWise CE 3.4
Hi Chris, hope you're well.
I've got more excel converters for MX than you can imagine to help automate one thing or another
You can't import whole designs though and all the intricate details you created with code. You're probably ok in that a lot of your designs are from scratch and thus simple to replicate. Some of our designs have intricacies along the whole scheme and tweaked as such to meet tight constraints. Being able to transfer alignment input files isn't good enough. We don't have the time or budgets to be converting past 'on-hold' designs or even ongoing designs which will be on site after the withdrawal of mx licences. Any design software should be forwards compatible without redesign.
I'll be interested to see why we are being given Civil3D/MX as preferred design tools, when you are using OR. I think I need to get to the bottom of this, because I don't want to pursue one route, only to be told to switch down the line.
Cheers.
Cheers Mark,
I'll bear that in mind.
I am going to give ORD another try in my own time, based on one of my schemes I'm working on. I need to bottom this out, I don't want to be pursuing Civil3D if its not going to perform as expected.
What is the cross section output like nowadays? You will probably remember when OR wasn't very friendly when selecting which features to display. Every time it processed, the 'features' never retained the same name, so was requiring manipulation every time to produce cross sections. Has this been corrected? Is it now a straightforward process?
Adrian.
The drawing production side of things is completely different. ORD has a new drawing production engine so you dont "export to native" anymore and use MX, Inroads, etc. to create your drawings. The new engine is based on dynamic sectioning of your 3d model that can be considered overcomplicated, but I can see where they're heading with it.
There's some pretty good info here about it:
https://learn.bentley.com/app/VideoPlayer/LinkToIndividualCourse?LearningPathID=113449&CourseId=129681&MediaID=5015000
I know there's some work happening to add some automation to the process so some potential here, but we are still missing the concept of a nest input file process that would punch out dozens of sets of sections over lunch..
.