We are unable to move to Ss4 due to client deliverables, among other things.
But last week, I needed to use the Roundabout Tools which got me looking at Civil Geometry more closely. In my early attemplts, to use them, I seemed to run into a lot of issues.
- I was using the latest Tri-Services Workspace and its XIN. I had enable dynamic annotation to place stationing and alignment annotation automatically.
- I enabled design checks to automatically place curves when placing alignments via PI's.
- When placing a horizontal alignment in Civil Geometry by PI's, I ran into the following problems
- The annotation was minuscule. We are talking microscopic. I had to change my coordinate readout to 8 decimal places for the Element Info/properties dialog box to show the text height and width. It was scaled down, not up, from the XIN/Text Style values.
- If I failed to get a tangent between two curves during placement, moving a PI using the manipulators would open a gap in the alignment that the stationing would skip over.
- There seemed to be no easy way to insert the line between the curves nor was there an easy way to change a PI with no curve into one with a curve or to remove a curve to have just a PI.
- There seems to be no Horizontal Element tools. These are some of the most valuable tools in the InRoads toolbox and must be carried forward into Open Roads.
- If I annotated the alignment in InRoads since the Civil Geometry annotation was useless, it did not erase if I further manipulated the alignment as Civil Geometry.
On the plus side, the roundabout tools were great. And there are many of the civil geometry tools I have not touched yet that seem to be very useful.
For a long time InRoads users, I felt like a fish out of water trying to use these tools. And it seems like a different mind set might be needed to use these tools. But when some curve by curve edits are needed in the middle of an alignment, these tools seem primitive compared to the Horizontal Element tools.