Civil 3D – FileDia Switch

A buddy of mine took 2 subscriptions of Civil 3D home, while brooding over the need to reinstall his Civil application.  2009 or upgrade…. The rest of his project team are on 2009.

It appears as though the whole platform was fouled, because every time he tried to open the non-default drawing, Civil 3D would crash.  I was neck deep in an overdue project, so he went on his way.

This morning he reported to me that before wiping everything, he set his FileDia switch back to 1.  That’s the switch that initiates a dialog for file operation such as Open, Save, etc.  Without the switch, you just get command line options.

I like command line, but not that much…

Lo and behold, everything perked right up.  He was able to recover his drawings, and open anything from Civil, inside or out.

The moral to this story is before you reinstall due to crashing while opening a DWG, try checking your FileDia switch first.  Just type “filedia” at the command line, and set it to1.

Civil 3D – Google Earth v5 problems

8/14/2009

If you have tried installing Google Earth 5 recently, you may have run into some problem.  I did, and it led me on a wild goose chase that ended at the ‘Being Civil’ blog.  The article noted scaling problems when inserting images via the Civil 3D Google Image link.

The Being Civil Blog image article

The article explains that the current download version (5.0.11733.9347) is bugged, but points to a previous version (5.0.11337.1968) and says that it should work properly.

I did a Google search for “Google Earth 5.0.11337.1968“ and got numerous results.  Be Aware!!! Most still downloaded from the Google Earth site current release.

I found the Google release url…  Google Earth 5.0 (5.0.11337.1968) from Google

After installing I confirmed the version number; I got the same results!

Time for a major version change

I found a link on Google to the previous Major revision: 4.3…Google Earth 4.3 (4.3.7284.3916) from Google (Later I found a message from Jason Hickey discussing the merits of 4.3)

I installed it, and verified the version number; uuuh same result

Test Bed C3D 09 and GE 4.3

I ambushed one of my associates, who has been using Google 4.3 with Hypack.  I had him mock up the same 2 overlapping images, and link them into Civil 09.  Exact same result.

More Research

I went shopping to find out what gives.  Discussion groups were my next stop.  I found a discussion that referred to the ‘Being Civil’ blog (again), with a different article from February.  It discussed surfacing, and after GE 4.2 the surfacing import was altered, and a reduced amount of data being exported to C3D.  They said if this is a problem, we should go back to 4.2.  Well, I’ve tried all the other versions, why not 4.2.  I know it’s not a surfacing error, but maybe they are linked.  They were kind enough to provide a link:

Google Earth 4.2 (4.2.0205) from filehippo  BTW….The same site has links to ALL the versions!

No Joy!! 

I did the same overlap test at a different region in Vegas and even worse results.

Conclusions

I wish I had some conclusions. I can’t say what the answer is.  It just does not work properly.

All things said, I have not been keeping up with the “Google Earth gotta have latest version” push.  It’s a nice tool, but I don’t use it every day.  I cannot say when things went wrong, but I don’t remember a problem in 2008.  2009 was a blur, and all I did was study for Certifications.

I might be inclined to blame my poor abused machine, but my associate received the same results from a different version of both Civil and Google. 

If you are having the same trouble, please post here so I can determine a pattern.  Then maybe we can get Justin and Jason will to do a little more research for us.

Civil 3D – 2010 Point Label style BUG REPORT

I logged a Bug Report on Civil3D.com, and you can check it out HERE.

I wanted to thank James Wedding and the staff at EE for putting up with me, and always being willing to assist.  I always know I’ll get some relief when I call.

I want to thank my VAR, Applied Technologies Group, for some outstanding dedication and support.  The entire team was at a remote function.  I called John Sayre who was driving in a hail storm at the time.  He insisted on getting all the details and reassured me, when most would have backed out for obvious reasons. The bug confirmation came within 10 minutes, and the support case was already logged in to Autodesk by the time I got the message. Rob, you better hang on to that guy, he means business.

Thank you Dana, for always trying to help.