SurveyTools for BricsCAD V25 Release Notes

SurveyTools for BricsCAD V25

SurveyTools for BricsCAD is an all-in-one solution for surveying workflows by MicroSurvey®. The combined solution includes leading technology from MicroSurvey, Bricsys and the trusted industry partner, Leica Geosystems. As Hexagon companies, we work together to enhance day-to-day workflows between our solutions. This release of SurveyTools for BricsCAD introduces a very exciting feature—Survey Groups. Survey Groups allow you to automatically filter field data on import into groups by point description using AutoMAP, allowing further data management capabilities reducing the need for elaborate layer naming conventions.

What’s New in Version 25

What’s New

Support for BricsCAD V25.2+ (The BricsCAD version needs to be 25.2 or newer, but still 25.x)
The Survey Group Manager command found on the MsPoints ribbon, next to the Active Coordinate Editor.
Survey Groups is a powerful data management tool that can control the visibility of entities in your drawing, allowing you to manually (or automatically on import) sort data into groups representative of how that point should be used.
Survey Groups can contain points, lines, polylines, blocks, and labels—all the entities which you import from field data.
Survey Groups can be created from a selection of entities, and have filters applied to only include points within an elevation range.
The Active Coordinate Editor can have a filtering applied through the Survey Group Manager to list only the points which are currently visible using group visibility. This can be used to list only one group of points, making it easy to export an ascii of points contained in a single group, such as a control, evidence, setout, or surface group.
AutoMAP has a new field for each description, “Add to Survey Groups:”, where multiple groups can be entered separated by a semicolon. When a field file is imported through the FieldGenius wizard, Leica DBX in, or ASCII in, points with that description and their labels will be added to the corresponding groups. This is useful to automate the sorting of data into a Surface group, excluding points which should not be included in the surface. You can then view only the surface group, and window select in the CAD window to create the surface from the appropriate data.
Points with a description which are not defined in the current AutoMAP will be sorted into the group “Miscoded”. This group provides a first place to look to identify points from the field which may require extra attention.
Three importers have the ability to place the imported points into a new or existing survey group, they are the ASCII importer, Leica DBX importer, and, of course, our FieldGenius SyncWizard.
In AutoMAP, Group Codes has been renamed to Relate Codes, and Group Range has been renamed to Apply to Range. This was done to more closely describe the functionality of these boxes, but also to avoid any confusion with the new “Add to Survey Groups” field.
SurveyTools for BricsCAD can now be installed on a virtual machine.
Label Styles for the Curve Labels have been added, previously there was only a single option for curve labels on the MsAnnotate ribbon.

What’s Improved

We improved the licensing dialog for network licenses to grey out options which cannot be used when a license has been checked out for offline usage.
Bearing and Distance label style indexes have been increased from 5 to 10.
BricsCAD, when copying settings forward from a previous install will also copy forward the search paths. SurveyTools now clears out previous installation directory search paths, which could cause old or unintended files to be loaded, such as the SurveyTools CUI file.

Bug Fixes

Drawings which were saved to a file path backed up by Microsoft OneDrive would improperly close due to unexpected locking of files. OneDrive will no longer negatively impact the saving and closing of drawings, causing the Drawing Recovery Wizard to appear when opening those drawings.
When processing XYZ linework with the Active Coordinate Editor open, some datasets would cause a crash.
The Lot Closure Routine when using Bearings would show some curve values in Azimuth.
We improved how cloud-based network licenses are handled to reduce the frequency of problems some users experienced.
COGO was not computing the correct direction using the + or – options. For example: 1..2 <return> + <return> 90 <return> would only use the original 1..2 direction.
Checking out a cloud-based network license for offline use would not reliably work.
MS_RESCALE was not handling point ID label ellipses, double ellipses, or rectangles correctly.
Some text in the ribbons was not displaying correctly in previous releases of SurveyTools for BricsCAD.

Known Issues

Several known issues are being addressed. Here is the list of the most common ones:

When MicroSurvey commands are added to tool palettes, the command icons do not display but the text labels do.
Sometimes the Independent Point Numbers, Descriptions, and Elevations will remain visible until the user pans or zooms when a layer containing points has been frozen or turned off.

Compatibility and Upgrades

MicroSurvey SurveyTools for BricsCAD will read and write to *.DWG drawing files and our *.MSZ database interchangeably with our other CAD products: MicroSurvey CAD, embeddedCAD, and inCAD. There are no compatibility issues to use saved MicroSurvey databases between these products. We have supported the *.MSZ format since 2008, and offer conversion utilities for older formats which are described here.

Civil 3D objects can be converted and imported into BricsCAD using the CIVIL3DIMPORT command.

Important Notes

MicroSurvey Subscription License

Existing SurveyTools for BricsCAD users with a current subscription license must enter their License ID and Password to run this version.

Each license has a different subscription plan, so multiple licenses may not have the same expiry date.

You can confirm your subscription expiry date by reviewing the About screen found on the Help ribbon.

If your subscription has expired, you can phone us at 1-800-668-3312 or 1-250-707-0000 to renew it. Without a current subscription plan, you will not be able to work with the new version.

MicroSurvey License Portal for Floating License Users

If you have purchased a floating license, you may visit microsurvey.com/license to review usage statistics on your license.

After purchase, you will be asked to create a login for the portal.

System Requirements

SurveyTools for BricsCAD V25 is compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Full administrator rights are required to install SurveyTools for BricsCAD V25, but it can be run by limited user accounts.

For detailed system requirements and recommendations, please review this online article.

Software Requirements

SurveyTools for BricsCAD V25 requires that BricsCAD V25.2.05 or newer (but still V25) be installed already. If you do not currently own BricsCAD V25, you can register and download a 30-day trial here.

After BricsCAD V25 is installed, run the SurveyTools for BricsCAD executable to complete the installation. To launch SurveyTools for BricsCAD, simply run SurveyTools for BricsCAD from the desktop or start menu and BricsCAD will be run.