What Happened to Maptek Vulcan 8.2.2

Back on June 26^th Maptek announced the release of Vulcan 8.2.2. This release came less than two months after 8.2.1 was introduced to the market and seemed to indicate an effort by Maptek to bring releases to Vulcan users on a more frequent basis. The 8.2.2 release prompted me to write an evaluation of some of the upgrades (see:  Maptek Vulcan 8.2.2 Release).

Vulcan users had two weeks to enjoy the new release before some bad news came down. On July 11^th an email came out stating that version 8.2.2 was flawed. If users were attempting to select block model blocks using bounding surfaces Vulcan was returning incorrect results. This is a pretty big deal to anyone who uses the effected tools but I never select blocks using bounding surfaces so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Little did I know that this error prompted Maptek to pull release 8.2.2 from the market completely. I was helping  a co-worker download the most current service pack for Vulcan when I discovered that releases are no longer on the open side of Maptek’s website. Users must now use the password protected side of Maptek to download any service packs. Once we jumped through the appropriate hoops we discovered that release 8.2.2 had been removed completely.

Maptek doesn’t like to admit that they were wrong. They don’t like to admit that their software has bugs until they are fixed. I was shocked to learn that Maptek was willing to admit that they were so wrong about the release of a Vulcan version that they were willing to pull it from the market.

Maptek Vulcan 8.2.3 is due out soon. Let’s hope that it lasts a little longer than two weeks on the market.