AutoCAD Architecture 2018 and AutoCAD MEP 2018 New Feature Summary

It’s a really short one. Even AutoCAD 2018 had a quite short one, at least anything in AutoCAD 2018 is of course included for AutoCAD Architecture 2018 and AutoCAD MEP 2018.

With the new DWG 2018 drawing file format be careful about if and when to upgrade and how it affects others involved, but in your team and customers.

Based on the “news” it seems like there’s only one developer left working for these products. Question is how long AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP will be around?

A bug managed to be introduced. It’s been in AutoCAD Architecture before. In the example below I have multiple apps installed and each app gets one tab named either Plug-ins or Add-ins.

Design Center has not been updated even though Autodesk Seek is no longer available. See image below. Not so much a vertical issue but rather an issue in vanilla AutoCAD.

Here are the “news” and it’s always nice to see some bugs to be fixed:

Content

Approximately 400 new MVBlocks and block references are added to the metric content in the Design Center. The content includes lighting, furnishing, elevators, escalators, and electrical services.

High Resolution (4K) Monitor Support

Most AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP user interfaces are now optimized to work with high resolution monitors. As a result, dialog boxes such as the Style Manager and Display Manager dialog boxes, and palettes such as the Tool palettes and Styles Browser, scale correctly when you increase the text size in Windows display properties.

Performance Improvements

The value of the HPMAXLINES system variable has been optimized to reduce the time taken to open drawing files. The occasional crashes that occurred when opening and saving files, as well as when mirroring drawings containing Architecture entities are addressed.

Seamless Updates

Whenever an update is installed on AutoCAD Architecture 2018 or AutoCAD MEP 2018, the ribbon highlights the feature that was updated.

Product Quality Improvement

Projects addressing product reliability have resulted the following improvements:

• Exporting and converting schedule tables to Excel produces correct results under conditions it would not in previous releases.
• Transparency values are retained when set through the Display Properties dialog.
• Isolate Objects now correctly retain divided spaces when one of the spaces is isolated.
• It is no longer necessary to refresh a project to display new sheets in the Project Navigator.
• The Manage Content Library dialog is no longer suppressed when launched from the Style Browser, soon after migrating from a previous release.
• Issues with PDF drawings that did not import correctly in previous releases have been identified and rectified.
• The EXPORTTOAUTOCAD command no longer results in a system crash when exporting drawing files containing Open Light entities.
• Product Updates are now visible in network deployment when added through the Add Updates option.
• 2D block references will no longer participate in section creation operations.
• You can now split or trim mass elements when using non-default UCS.

System requirements found here.

JTB World’s apps ACA_db and Timber Tool have been updated to work with the 2018 version of AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP.