Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

wildfire to 2001

xcad

Member
hello



what about data translation from wildfire to 2001

yes i know... try for .neu... and so on...

but i loose the efficiency of my model... what about parameters, layers, relations, and other o important info that every part carries ?



i used proe 2001 (2002430) and wildfire (2002280) for importing data from wildfire to proe as Mr. Allen Weston from

Advanced Design Incorporated in www.synthx.com described (about translating data from 2001 to 2000i^2) but proe crashes ...



and iam wondering ... in my company we have 16 licences for proe 2001, if PTC allows as to convert data direct from wildfire to 2001 (like : File>save as> proe 2001) then we could pass from one major version to another in more safe way..

now we have to wait so all the users get (in some way) familiar to wildfire so to pass all the designers (engineers) to the new version.



and iam wondering .. is it possible ?



as we all know the pressure in the industry doesn't allow the users every time to learn and be familiar with all new major versions of proe..

so ,according my expierience, PTC should left for these two versions a door open for data translations from wildfire to 2001..

kernel is the same, the procedure of making features (simple or advanced) is the same, drawings are the same, smt parts are same, so why not ?



.. just another opinion...



Karavasilis
 
This would be a welcome addition to Wildfire. It would make many people happy. Let's take a look at Microsoft Office products for a minute. You can do a Save As on Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. to an earlier version. You will loose some of the functionality that the latest versions have, but you are reminded of that before you save. Usually, I don't care, because I pretty much just use the basic functions of Word, Excel, & PowerPoint.



This is why I think PTC does not use this functionality:

It's too hard, too costly, and would take too much time and resources.



With each new version of Pro/E, PTC adds a lot of new functionality or does things in a completely different way. For example, standard holes, intent chains, mechanism connections, analysis features, warp features, flexible parts (& more) have all been introduced or radically changed over the past few versions. How would PTC handle these features in earlier versions when their functionalities weren't available then? I suppose PTC can rig up some way of faking them in, like changing standard holes to sketched holes, or making dummy, unintelligent single features. This would add a lot of time, resources, and cost into making these things happen. It would require much more careful programing and debugging than a Microsoft Office product would.



I think PTC sees a better return of investment in making new and better functionality rather than reverse engineering for previous versions of Pro/E. No matter what the business is, the bottom line is to cut costs and make more money for your stockholders. I see nothing wrong with that (as long as it is done honestly).



Another reason, I think, may be that PTC want's everyone to have to upgrade to the latest version. It forces customers to pay maintenance fees. It also brings a lot of hype to their latest version. If everyone was satisfied with version 20, and Wildfire users could Save As version 20, then there wouldn't be the hype and need for Wildfire, and PTC sales would decrease, their stock would go down, and the quality of their next version would be even poorer because they wouldn't have the money and resources to put into it. PTC has to make money to survive in the marketplace. That's the name of the game.



My $.02.
 
I called support and was told that they are working on backwards compatibility but it is not ready yet.

They have made similar claims before so I wouldnt hold my breath.

Mike
 
Why are you trying to go back to 2001? Does wildfire not work correctly? I would see an issue for suppliers or customers that are out of sync, but if you are in the same company it might be time to sync roll out dates for new revs of software.



my $0.02
 
AutoCAD is one of the largest most widely used 2d drafting systems in the world, yet they always includes a Save as option in the latest versions, does this company not have the same pressures to keep market advantage and make a profit for it's shareholders, how does this affect your argument Jason ?.
 
I believe backward compatibility would increase Pro-e sales. The company I work for has about 15 seats and 25 users all working efficiently with 2001. We have thousands of parts, assemblies and drawings all shared from a master library. To switch to wildfire means training everyone and upgrading every seat all at once. Production Engineering would essentially be shut down for several weeks. Anyone left behind using 2001 would not be able to work. One part modified and resaved in wildfire will cause failure when regenerating a 2001 assembly. For this reason the company has decided not to upgrade.



Backward compatibility would mean individuals could upgrade at their one pace making it much more attractive for larger companies to slowly upgrade. Most companies won’t see an increase in efficiency with wildfire versus 2001, since the majority of users use basic part, assembly and drawing functions. Sure it is important to push Pro-e software development, but I think PTC programmers should always keep backward compatibility in mind when changing the software to minimize the cost of upgrading.



Limited functionality is available when converting wildfire parts and assemblies to the .neu format using the topobus_enable option. All the features and datums are gone and the part can not be modified in 2001. Additional features can be added to the original part but when creating a new drawing, all of the original dimension and are gone. Resaving a .neu part to a .prt part using the same name works, but since the datums are gone, 2001 assemblies using the imported part will fail regeneration. Does anyone know if 2001 can import a wildfire drawing?
 
Too many people are getting caught up in the can I save a wildfire model as 2001 thing. Wildfire is nothing more than Release 24. If you save a model in release 19, you couldn't open it in release 18. Nothing new here. Wildfire is simply the latest release..... UPGRADE and get over it!
 
>>If you save a model in release 19, you couldn't open it in release 18



Actually, that was the one time that you could ever open a newer model in an older version of Pro/E. R19 was basically just a bug-fix for R18 and was backward compatible.



(but then again, maybe I'm senile)



-Brian
 
the one time that you could ever open a newer model in an older version of Pro/E.



Sounds right.



Wasn't R18 PTC's first attempt to drop ProPDM and R19 basically added PDM to R18 so there was no real additional functionality in R19.



This bug-fix was one big oh sh*t !!! that PTC can be proud of..
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top