Interest & effort check on older Alibre version assembly support

dnm

Hello,

I'm just writing to inquire about both the efforts needed and any interest in supporting assemblies from older Alibre Design versions. Selfishly, as both an Alibre and Mecway user, I'm excited to see the recent support for Alibre assemblies, and the extra work taken to make that initial support also work with older than current Alibre Design versions (e.g., from originally version 28 to then also include 26, 27, 28.0.2 in Mecway 27). However, I happen to still be on a quite old version of Alibre Design (Alibre Design Expert 2018.2) and I'm curious at what the level of effort is to support assemblies from this version. Is it a matter of having sample files from this version to see what would need to be changed to support (and thus, how much effort it is), or are there other Alibre-specific factors at play?

Thanks in advance, and thanks for Mecway!

Victor

I haven't made any effort to support older versions and don't know if it's trivial or very difficult. I guess you tried it and it didn't work? Any error message?

dnm

I get the following error message when trying to import a part:



and at the time of taking this screenshot (FWIW), Alibre Design 2018 is also open and running.

BTW, after clicking "Cancel" in that dialog, I get a crash in ngmesh.exe:



Specific Alibre Design version data from the "About" dialog:

Alibre Design™ Expert
Version: 2018.2 64-bit [Build 19071]

Hope this helps. Thanks again for your reply!

Victor

Oh, that's worse than not supported, it's broken. Thanks for letting me know. I'll try to fix the crashing but don't think I'll be able to add support for it because it seems to be too different from newer versions since the list of installed Alibre Designs doesn't even detect it.

Victor

Just a follow-up. I wasn't able to reproduce the crash with the same version of Alibre Design. However version below 25 still won't be compatible with Mecway so I'll leave it as is. 25 seems to be the oldest version that works.