Thanks to R.K. McSwain for pointing out that at least one user has reported unexpected shutdowns from AutoCAD (Architecture, probably) following installation of the 2018.1 Update. The problem went away following uninstallation of the update.
Caveat updator.
Anybody else have any issues or are you all waiting for the early adopters to find out for you?
Edit: it turns out the crash occurs when opening 2013 DXF files.
Edit 2: a hotfix has been posted here.
Autodesk has released the AutoCAD (and LT) 2018.1 Update, not to be confused with the earlier ill-fated 2018.0.1 Update. It’s only available for currently-paying subscription and maintenance customers. The “non critical” bug fixes in this Update (by Autodesk’s definition) are being withheld from Autodesk’s other customers.
Those of you who have allowed your maintenance to expire due to Autodesk’s development inaction and unjustified price increases can consider yourselves duly punished for failing to fall into line.
If you have the execrable Autodesk desktop app installed (not recommended) and it works as expected, this update will present itself to you. Otherwise, get it from your Autodesk Account page. Go to Management > AutoCAD > 2018 Downloads > Updates & Add-ons and then pick the appropriate AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download.
It has yet to be seen whether this update will break things, so if you’re feeling nervous you might want to hold off for a while and let others find out for you. (Edit: it broke one person’s AutoCAD, see comment from R.K. below).
Weighing in at well over 400 MB, the AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download is about twice the size of a complete BricsCAD download, even before expansion. So it must contain a pretty impressive amount of stuff, right? Or is it all bloat? Well, it includes 2018.0.1 and 2018.0.2 and adds this:
The user interface has been touched up to support the above changes. The Preview Guide has been prepared to the usual excellent standard.
That’s all useful stuff, and most welcome. Work has gone into providing some genuinely useful adjustments. But there’s not a lot of it. Autodesk is still just tinkering at the edges.
Overall, AutoCAD 2018.1 is a pretty minor mid-term update, falling a long way short of, say, Release 13c4. That update was shipped on CD to all customers. Free. No maintenance or subscription required.
Bricsys does much more significant and worthwhile mid-term updates than this, and doesn’t charge for them. Perpetual license owners, even those not on maintenance, get them for nothing. Along with the bug fixes. Which are properly documented.
Autodesk used to do all that too, but its customer service has since regressed to the point that the standards of the Release 13 days are something to yearn for. Long-term Autodesk customers will know just how damning that state of affairs is. Autodesk lags a long way behind not only the competition, but also its former self.
Autodesk CEO and all-rental architect Andrew Anagnost has asked Autodesk customers to give him a year to prove that his business model will provide them with better value. It’s not clear when that year was supposed to start, but the all-subscription start date of 1 August 2016 seems reasonable. However you reckon it, a big slab of that year is gone and there’s very little to show for it.
Time to get your finger out, Andrew.
AutoCAD 2018.0.1 is dead, long live 2018.0.2!
Here’s the readme.
Here’s the 64-bit direct link.
Here’s the 32-bit direct link.
This supposedly fixes stuff that 2018.0.1 broke, such as the signed VLX thing. Will this one break other stuff? I guess we’ll find out.
In a previous post, I showed that AutoCAD is bloatware by comparing the size of its downloads to that of BricsCAD. Obviously, an application that’s ten times the size it should be is going to cost you a lot of unnecessary bandwidth, download time and drive space. But maybe you don’t care about that. What practical difference does it make?
Well, for one thing, the blimping-out of Autodesk’s former flagship product has a big effect on installation time. Vast and ever-increasing amounts of time are wasted by users of Autodesk products, just waiting for the things to finish installing. But isn’t this just the inevitable price to pay for the functionality provided?
No. Again, BricsCAD proves it.
The installation comparison is shown below. These installations were performed on a mid-range Windows 10 i7 PC with 8 GB RAM. The downloaded files were executed from a local hard drive and the applications were installed to a local SSD. If I needed to enter information manually, I stopped the clock while that was going on. Times are the total elapsed time from commencement in minutes and seconds. More user input was required for the AutoCAD install, but that has not been counted in this comparison. That is, by eliminating the human input stages I’m being kind to Autodesk.
I performed a complete default installation of BricsCAD. In the case of AutoCAD, I turned off the installation of Recap and A360 Desktop to make for a fair comparison, as equivalents are not part of the BricsCAD install and those components are not required by the average CAD user. Everything else was as per default settings.
| Installation Operation |
Timestamp |
| Execute BricsCAD-V17.2.03-1-en_US(x64).msi | 0:00 |
| Prompt for questions | 0:03 |
| Click Yes for UAC Allow | 0:14 |
| Installation complete, start application | 0:35 |
| First run startup | 0:40 |
| Total time from install to ready to draw |
0:40 (100%) |
That’s astonishingly fast. Remember, this is an application that is more capable than AutoCAD overall. How does installing AutoCAD itself compare?
| Installation Operation |
Timestamp |
| Execute AutoCAD_2018_English_Win_64bit_dlm_001_002.sfx.exe | 0:00 |
| Self-extractor finishes initializing | 2:46 |
| Self-extractor finishes extracting, click Yes for UAC Allow | 4:56 |
| Install screen appears, answer questions, start install proper | 5:04 |
| Desktop icon appears | 8:10 |
| Install complete, restart required | 10:21 |
| Restart complete, start application | 11:41 |
| Activation begins | 12:05 |
| Activation complete | 12:21 |
| Close AutoCAD, execute AutoCAD_2018_Product_Help_English_Win_32_64bit_dlm.sfx.exe | 12:25 |
| Self-extractor finishes initializing | 14:44 |
| Self-extractor finishes extracting, click Yes for UAC Allow | 14:54 |
| Install screen appears, answer questions, start install proper | 14:57 |
| Offline Help installation complete, execute AutoCAD_2018.0.1_64bit_r2.exe | 15:44 |
| 2018.0.1 install complete, start AutoCAD | 16:50 |
| Second startup complete | 17:18 |
| Total time from install to ready to draw |
17:18 (2595%) |
Installed sizes are roughly 0.5 GB for BricsCAD and 2.4 GB for AutoCAD. It’s hard to be exact because Autodesk likes to perform multiple installs when one is requested and tends to squirrel away various components in a variety of places. Here are the ten(!) new entries in Add or Remove Programs after just the first stage of the AutoCAD install:
OK, so maybe AutoCAD takes 26 times as long as BricsCAD to install. But the AutoCAD installation images are so much prettier than the plain old BricsCAD dialogs! Shall we call it a draw?
No.
Autodesk, you took a real pounding here. Bricsys chewed you up, spat you out, ground the chewings into the dust, set fire to the remains and then put out the fire with bodily fluids. Sorry, but you deserve it. Your installations have been ridiculously slow for years and are getting worse. Installing a vertical product or suite is beyond a joke; it makes even the AutoCAD install look speedy. It’s not good enough.
As I mentioned earlier, the release of AutoCAD 2018 was followed almost instantaneously by the first update, 2018.0.1. At the time of writing, there was no official information about this update. Some information was later made available, but questions remained.
Now the update has been silently withdrawn. Go to Autodesk Account > Management > AutoCAD > Downloads > Updates & Add-ons and you will no longer see this:
The infamous Autodesk desktop app also shows no sign of this update. So why has it been withdrawn? Autodesk isn’t saying, but thanks to Jimmy Bergmark, we know that installing the 2018.0.1 update re-introduces a bug from AutoCAD 2016 (pre SP1) where signed VLX files don’t load. This means various 3rd party applications won’t load if the developers have done the Autodesk-recommended right thing by digitally signing their code.
If you’re a developer and want to test your code under the different versions, these direct links still work at the time of writing:
If you’re not sure whether or not you have 2018.0.1 installed, the About command will show you.
You can also check for this under program control by inspecting the system variable _VERNUM. In AutoCAD, it’s “O.49.0.0” before the patch and “O.61.0.0” after. I don’t know about LT, and I don’t know about the situation with verticals. Do they incorporate the 2018.0.1 fixes? How about the VLX bug? Should users who have applied this update uninstall it? Is this going to be done automatically or by Autodesk desktop app? How should users manually revert to the pre-2018.0.1 state if they need to load applications that use signed VLX files?
I think it’s fair to say that Autodesk’s management of this update has been a disaster. This is just one in a long line of AutoCAD update screw-ups going back decades. It proves comprehensively that continuous updates from Autodesk are a non-starter.
Autodesk can’t be trusted avoid breaking things with its updates. It can’t be trusted to effectively communicate about the updates. It can’t be trusted to provide fixes for its broken fixes. It can’t be trusted to provide an automated update mechanism that doesn’t hog your resources or one that works properly.
The AutoCAD 2018 install inflicts the execrable Autodesk desktop app on your systems without asking, which in itself is a betrayal of trust. I recommend you uninstall it immediately after all Autodesk installs. You will need to right-click the app tray icon and use the Exit option before you can uninstall it using Add or Remove Programs.
Autodesk needs your trust to make its continuous update idea work. Autodesk doesn’t have that trust. Autodesk doesn’t come close to deserving it.
You may have seen me mention in passing that AutoCAD is bloatware. That’s not just the general grumpy-old-user moan you see from long-term users like me, who can remember when AutoCAD used to fit on one floppy disk.
Yes, programs get bigger over time as new functionality is added and old functionality needs to be retained. Hardware gets bigger, better, faster over time to compensate for that. I get that. Understood.
The AutoCAD bloatware problem is much more than that. AutoCAD is literally ten times the size it needs to be, to provide the functionality it does.
How do I know? BricsCAD proves it. Here’s what I mean.
| Downloaded File | Size (KB) |
| BricsCAD-V17.2.03-1-en_US(x64).msi | 248,812 |
| Total (1 file) | 248,812 (100%) |
| Downloaded File | Size (KB) |
| AutoCAD_2018_English_Win_64bit_dlm_001_002.sfx.exe | 2,065,829 |
| AutoCAD_2018_English_Win_64bit_dlm_002_002.sfx.exe | 328,277 |
| AutoCAD_2018.0.1_64bit_r2.exe | 120,663 |
| AutoCAD_2018_Product_Help_English_Win_32_64bit_dlm.sfx.exe | 180,013 |
| Total (4 files) | 2,694,782 (1083%) |
Which dog is which? They’re both cute, but which would you put your money on in a race?
(Original image: Przykuta)
(Original image: Lisa Cyr)
I’m actually being very generous to Autodesk in this comparison. The two primary AutoCAD download executables alone expand from 2.4 GB to 5.2 GB before install, requiring a total at least 7.6 GB of disk space before we even get to the same ready-to-install point as BricsCAD’s 0.24 GB MSI file.
No, it’s not because BricsCAD is a cut-down application compared with AutoCAD. The opposite is true. Overall, BricsCAD is significantly more feature-rich than AutoCAD. It near-exactly duplicates over 95% of AutoCAD’s functionality and then adds a big slab of its own on top of that. Some of it is in paid-for optional extras, but the code that provides that functionality is still included in the same small download.
This issue isn’t unique to AutoCAD. Super-morbid obesity seems to be standard among Autodesk products. The AutoCAD-based verticals that add a comparable level of functionality to that the BricsCAD download includes are much bigger again!
Anybody care to explain what’s going on here?
As I mentioned earlier, the release of AutoCAD 2018 was followed almost instantaneously by the first update, 2018.0.1. At the time of writing, there was no official information about this update. Some information is now available, but more questions have arisen.
If, like me, you don’t/won’t/can’t have Autodesk desktop app running on your systems, the only current official way to get at the download is using Autodesk Account (but read the whole of this post before you go there). That’s also how you get at information about the update. Go to Management > AutoCAD > Downloads > Updates & Add-ons. From there, it’s not obvious how to get the information, but it’s under More options.
From there, pick View Details. This will show you the following information (after you pick More):
As you can see, the severity is considered high. If you pick View release notes, you can see the readme, or you can go straight to it if you have this direct link. Here are the fixes described in the readme:
Although it would be easy to have a go at Autodesk for shipping a product that needs fixing within hours of release, that wouldn’t be entirely fair. No software is flawless. Stuff happens, and the sooner fixes are provided to resolve that stuff, the better. So I commend Autodesk for getting this fix out quickly.
That doesn’t mean Autodesk is blameless, though. Read on.
First, the way the information about this update was (or wasn’t) disseminated was sub-optimal. It has required too much prodding and guesswork to get to the point we are now, and we’re still not where we should be.
Next, there’s scant information in the readme. I don’t see any documented way of including this fix in a deployment, for example. That means it’s not possible to create a one-step automated install without resorting to trickery.
Further, this update isn’t available on the main Autodesk site. It needs to be. Even if you know the version number to look for, a search at autodesk.com will come up blank:
Using the Autodesk Knowledge Network Download Finder won’t help, either:
Fortunately, these direct links appear to work:
This brings me to my fourth point of criticism. See that the 64-bit executable has “r2” on it? The one I downloaded on 23 March doesn’t. The 64-bit executables are similar in size to each other but the binary content is different. The 32-bit 2018.0.1 has a date of 22 March and the 64-bit 2018.0.1 r2 has a date of 24 March. So it looks like the patch has been patched, at least for 64-bit users.
Information on this patch-patch is non-existent. Should somebody who downloaded and applied the 64-bit 2018.0.1, download and apply 2018.0.1 r2? Will that work? Do they need to uninstall 2018.0.1 first? How should they do that? Will the 32-bit 2018.0.1 also be updated to r2? Should those users hang off a few days to avoid wasting time or go ahead with what’s there now?
Over to you, Autodesk.
If you downloaded and installed AutoCAD 2018 yesterday and don’t/won’t/can’t have Autodesk desktop app running on your systems, you may already have another download to do, because AutoCAD 2018.0.1 is out.
At the time of writing there is no sign of this update on Autodesk’s main site, but you can get at it using Autodesk Account. Go to Management > AutoCAD > Downloads > Updates & Add-ons.
All that’s downloaded is an executable. No readme, nothing. There is currently no official information about the reasons behind this update, what it includes, what it might affect, how to include it in a deployment, etc. You’ll need to make up your own mind whether to install this update now or wait for information about it. I suggest the latter.
Of course, if you’re using desktop app and allowing automatic updates, you don’t need to worry about any of that that. Just trust Autodesk to not break anything and hope for the best.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Edit: see this post for further information.