Kean can’t provide that information, and neither can the selected bloggers who were given some insight under NDA last week, but I’m sure someone at Autodesk could. Maybe further information would help alleviate such concerns. If the groundwork is being laid for a file format that’s more heavily cloud-reliant or subject to continuous change, say, that would be an absolute tragedy for customers.Īutodesk is clearly manoeuvring customers into a position of maximum tie-in using various nefarious means, and if the DWG format change is part of that then it’s to be condemned.

It might be good news for customers or really terrible news. So I would be interested to learn more detail about this long-term work that’s critical to the long-term viability of the product. Kean’s a straight-shooter and I’m always ready to be corrected if it can be shown that I’m wrong. For now this is really only surfacing in small ways – I expect it’s contributing some performance benefits, for instance – but the work is absolutely critical to the long-term viability of the product. The main reason for the break in compatibility is some longer-term work that’s going on inside the AutoCAD codebase. In a recent blog post, highly respected Swiss-based Autodesk development and research person Kean Walmsley had this to say on that subject: In other words, it seems likely this is an anti-competitive change rather than a technical one. The 2013 DWG format is capable of holding pretty much anything you want… Although Autodesk cites performance reasons with certain drawings, I strongly suspect the new DWG format was introduced purely to make life difficult for competitors, and to encourage wavering customers to stay with Autodesk for fear of losing compatibility. Why does AutoCAD 2018 need a new DWG format? It probably doesn’t. In my review of AutoCAD 2018, I had this to say about AutoCAD 2018’s changed DWG format:

Autocad 2018 updates patches