Should there be a separate Technical sub-forum to collect discussion threads on the Autodesk BXD:Synthesis simulator?
Right now, searches lead everywhere and anywhere in the CD Forum.
It would be nice to have those threads regrouped, especially since I believe the Synthesis simulator will gain more users as it evolves.
If you take a look at the subforums we have at the moment, you will notice that they are all quite general. There’s no subforum for the NVIDIA Jetson, or for GradleRio for example. Even product specific subforums like NI LabVIEW and SolidWorks are dedicated to products that a very large portion of the FRC community already uses, and has used for a very long time.
Frankly speaking, Synthesis is pretty cool, but making a subforum for it and every other niche tool would clutter CD.
Considering that python and Creo, two fairly niche things within FRC (Python was used by a total of 43 teams in 2017) have subforums, I can see the validity of a Synthesis subfourm assuming its sustainability.
TIL Creo has a subforum.
I’m curious as to how many teams are using Synthesis as a part of their season, not teams with individuals who have gotten it to run with old cads of theirs, but teams that use it to an extent comparable to the Python use case (where teams are using it to make a competition robot).
After all, I’ve written and deployed robot code in Python in the offseason before and my team doesn’t count towards that figure.
I can’t imagine that’s an easy thing to measure though, since teams would need to self report this data (whereas the Python figure can be measured through the FMS).
Even then though, perhaps activity related to a topic is a better way to measure the need for a subforum. The Java subforum has 111 pages of threads for example, whereas Python only has 9. Doing a CD search for “BXD Synthesis” yields one and a half, half of which consisting of other topics where Synthesis was mentioned. (To compare with a topic that also doesn’t have a subforum, a search on “Jetson” yields 11 pages of results).
Some of this certainly has to do with age, but so far it seems that there just isn’t much activity related to it.
Perhaps there is value in a stickied thread as with the Jetson products?
Last time I asked for a subforum (for image processing in the programming forum) I was told CD was moving to a new forum software so they didn’t want to do that.
This was in 2016.
It’s coming… right after we get a water game. 
Considering the significant turn towards virtual visualization tools for the FRC 2019 Destination: Deep Space challenge, perhaps I should have used the Sub-forum title “Virtual Fields” instead of BXD:Synthesis.
There is a truly incredible offering being put on the table this year.