Migrating from legacy graphics to industrial graphics ?

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are common human reactions to change of any kind.

Industrial Graphics is a fantastically rich process visualization technology. With that, of course, comes a risk of getting carried away and we have seen plenty of examples where people create amazingly detailed and artistic graphics (which they could never achieve with the legacy graphics) but in doing so end up with something that is costly to render due to having higher level of detail and decorations than justifiable.

(one of our favorites that we often use as a benchmark is a beautiful beer bottling machine composed by > 50,000 extensively styled and animated graphical elements)

But let’s not confuse such (over-engineered) expressions of art with the migration of legacy graphics which tends to be trivial by comparison. My experience is that most legacy graphics run very well after conversion to Industrial Graphics and I have heard almost exclusively good things about this. That said, I’m looking forward to hearing from others about their experiences and especially if there is something specific that we can improve upon in this context. We too want people to leave the legacy graphics behind and to have a pleasant experience is doing so.

There are of course good practices to consider, and here too I hope that others will chime in with their practices. Here are some of mine off the top of my head:

• Use gradient fills with moderation (less is often more also from aesthetics standpoint)
• Use wizardry to include/exclude optional content and behaviors for reusable graphics.
• Don't overdo embedding of graphics into other graphics.
• Manage private/public state of custom properties carefully for embedding.
• Reduce the detail of symbols with small on-screen dimensions. Indistinguishable details still incur rendering cost and memory footprint.
• If possible, avoid unnecessary use of images, e.g. background images or icons. If you do use them, please make sure you understand image formats and how to use them appropriately.
  • JPEG for photographic content
  • PNG for graphic illustrations.
  • Avoid embedding BMP or TIFF images due to memory costs.
  • Consider importing SVG to native Industrial Graphics elements.
  • Consider using an icon fonts instead of images for basic iconography.
• Use hierarchical levels of information L1 – L4 instead of cramming all data into one screen. This is good both from performance and situational awareness standpoint.
• Lengthy queries, such as SQL queries, must always be async.
• Use common sense, e.g. no silly WhileShowing scripts

Finally, please consider that migration to Industrial Graphics opens the door to adopt modern aesthetics, modern typography, more efficient engineering workflows and content reuse, as well as for covering a wider range of use cases with richer content integration. Not to mention content reuse across multiple AVEVA and Schneider Electric products and services supporting Indistrial Graphics. Perhaps there should be a discussion about added value and not only migration for the sake of migration?

Final finally, if you have actual bugs or performance issues to report, please do so via Technical Support and we'll do our best to fix them.

Hi Rickard, thank you for the detailed answer, im hoping more engineers/ developers from the community are able to provide their experience, i definitely think industrial graphics are the way to go and I'm thinking AVEVA will use .NET Core for industrial graphics which then can be OS platform agnostic and provide blazing fast speeds, im a big fan of .NET Core