Grasshopper for Rhino5 available for download.

Dear all,

Grasshopper and Rhino 4 no longer get along and Grasshopper has decided it's time to move out. As of today, Grasshopper is officially a Rhino 5 only plug-in.

Today we are re-releasing 0.9.0014 with an updated installer that will install Grasshopper on all Rhino 5 installations on a system, be they 32 or 64 bit. There was a snag which prevents us from releasing an updated version and we won't be able to fix this until Rhino 5 SR1, though that shouldn't be all that far off as we've already been typing on SR1 for several weeks.

You can download the new installer from the usual location.

Here are some details, facts and suggestions in no particular order:

If you already have Grasshopper 0.9.0014 (released on September 28th 2012) running on Rhino4 and Rhino5, it's best to ignore this release.
The new installer will put Grasshopper into ProgramFiles(x86)\Grasshopper for Rhino 5\ or into MyDocuments\ depending on user privilege levels.
The new installer should not uninstall Grasshopper from Rhino4.
Grasshopper for Rhino4 will never expire.
There's no reason why you couldn't keep both the old Grasshopper for Rhino4 and the new Grasshopper for Rhino5.

You can always download the last release of Grasshopper for Rhino4 from our servers if you need to, we'll try and keep it available indefinitely.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Vienna, Austria

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dedackelzucht on November 2, 2012 at 3:58am

A non-stopable change....mhhh

Permalink Reply by Marios Tsiliakos on November 2, 2012 at 4:44am

Hi David,

Thank you for this update. Quick question: when running the plug-in manager I can see that grasshopper loads from the grasshopper folder stated above

The new installer will put Grasshopper into ProgramFiles(x86)\Grasshopper for Rhino 5\

on the other hand the about tab indicating the version still displays 28th of September as the date and not the 30th of October. Is this normal?

Best,

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 2, 2012 at 11:14am

Yes, it is the exact same version. The only difference is the installer. I would have liked to release a newer version, but there was a problem using the new Rhino5 installer engine and we had to very quickly fix the old installer as that was the path of lowest risk.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Vienna, Austria

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on November 2, 2012 at 7:00am

Hi David,

Thank you for this important update, verry good job.

I would like to know if there will be a version of grasshopper on rhinoceros 5 64 bits ?

Taken advantage of the performances 64BITS on rhinoceros 5 with grasshopper would be very useful.

David, thank for your reply.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 2, 2012 at 11:15am

Grasshopper will work on 32 and 64 bit Rhino 5. It always has. If you have Rhino 5 x64 and the newest installer did not properly load Grasshopper then it's a bug in the installer and we'd like to know about it.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Vienna, Austria

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on November 2, 2012 at 11:38am

No bug !

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on November 2, 2012 at 11:48am

I thought that app dedicated to rhino 5 64 bit would be more efficient

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 2, 2012 at 12:41pm

Define efficient.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Vienna, Austria

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on November 2, 2012 at 12:46pm

More effected

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 2, 2012 at 1:39pm

64 bit applications do not run faster and do not use less memory. In fact they probably use a little bit more memory. The only real difference between a 32 and a 64 bit application is that you can access more memory on 64 bits. So you can load larger files and generate more data.

Every time you store something in memory it has to be stored at a specific location. We call this location an address. The first thing you store can be stored at address 0*. If that thing requires a total of 18 bytes, then addresses 0 through 17 are used up. The next thing you store can then be stored at address 18. And so on and so forth. At some point you run out of addresses and when that happens there is no more room to store any new data and there is thus nothing more that your app can do and that's usually when Windows shoots the application in the head and buries the remains behind the chemical sheds.

The total number of unique addresses that can be represented by a 32-bit integer is 4,294,967,295 (4 GigaByte). However Windows only allows a 32-bit app to access 2GB, or potentially 3GB if a special switch is set. A 64-bit application is allowed to use 64-bit integers to identify memory addresses, which means the highest possible address is now 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (or 18.45 ExaBytes). Basically, as long as you have RAM to back you up, a 64-bit application will not run out of memory. Of course it may still become prohibitively slow as a lot of data requires a lot of computation and 64-bitness does absolutely nothing to make things go faster.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Vienna, Austria

* Not true in reality, Windows will already use up some of the available memory just to load the application.

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on November 4, 2012 at 9:07am

Divid,

Thank you for your verry detailed reply.

I knew the switched 3GB. But it does add "performance".

My equipement is exculisely 64Bits with 16Go RAM.

The grasshopper is developed for rhino4 base, I thought that it was not "optimized" for rhino5 performance level.

I think in the multi-process of tape management.

Managing even a calculation process can be more otpimise on rhino5.

e I noticed is most optimized functions of rhino5.

May be that with a reflection more turn on multi-core, so multi-process grasshopper could enjoy much more performance.

That think you?

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on November 4, 2012 at 10:58am

Just one little remark on the 32bit Windows thing. This is/was one thing that got most people confused who ran Rhino4 on Win x64.

What David said about 32bit apps is true for apps running on a 32bit Windows OS. However, 32bit applications running on a 64bit Windows each can get their own 4gigs of RAM (save for hardware reserved and a little bit of win Kernel).

...but this is old news anyway, since noone will be runnning a 32bit Rino5 on a 64bit Windows.