BenMerritt

I'm unable to reproduce the issue on my computer (Windows 11, Firefox 128.0.3). Does anything show up in the browser console when you try to play the video? (Press Ctrl+Shift+I, then switch to the "Console" tab of the pane that opens.)

As noted in the linked knowledge base article (the link to which got mangled in my original post; sorry about that), archives are kept in C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\Documents\[NAME OF YOUR PRODUCT]\Archives on Windows machines. The path may vary slightly, e.g. if you've moved your Documents folder to another drive, but the path noted in the article is by far the most common. Underneath that, the archives are organized into folders which contain normal plan and layout files. Are you referring to the Previous Versions tab of the Windows File Properties dialog? In my experience, I've seen relatively few programs actually integrate with the Windows File History functionality, which I imagine is for several reasons: The File History feature is only an incomplete backup solution; it does very little to protect against hard drive failures. The interface to access it is fairly well buried in menus unless you know what you're looking for. It only works on Windows, meaning that, for cross-platform software, another solution is necessary anyway. This limitation is reason that we implemented the archive system, which, as noted above, does keep daily revisions of the plan file in a way that works on all our supported operating systems.

No; that's really not what's going on at all. Current versions of Chief Architect software store the entire plan in a single file; there aren't logically separate "files" inside. What the software does include in the header record is a short fixed data sequence labeling the file as a Chief Architect plan file. This is written at the very beginning of every plan file using simple, extremely well-tested code. There's nothing to get "out of sync" because we always write exactly the same sequence. If a file has a different sequence when read into the program, that means that it has become corrupted, almost certainly due to something outside of Chief Architect, such as a failing hard drive or a bug in a third-party cloud synchronization service. In nearly every case, the corruption actually extends well beyond the header record, rendering the file unrecoverable. This header verification technique is a common software engineering practice used in a wide variety of formats, including the widespread PDF format. Corruption of a plan file is a deeply unfortunate situation, but there's no programming technique that can totally eliminate the risk of data loss, especially when it's due to something outside the software's control. To help reduce these kinds of issues, we recommend keeping regular backups of your files as outlined in this Knowledge Base article. The good news is that you may not have to start entirely from scratch. Chief Architect periodically writes archival copies of the plan file as it's being worked on. You may be able to access and restore one of those archive files.

The LOAD_PATH variable is used with Ruby's "require" function, which loads an external script file into the current Ruby process. Those script files can contain basically any valid Ruby code, which makes for a convenient place to put helper classes and so forth.

If you're using Google Chrome, it has some specific restrictions on cookies that don't play nicely with our authentication flow when the page is embedded in an <iframe>. You might try adding the following attribute: sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts".

What format are you exporting to from Chief? Blender seems to bring the textures in for me when using COLLADA (aside from the texture that's missing from the uploaded plan file), and it embeds them on export to glTF. Since the textures aren't embedded in the COLLADA file, though, just exported to a directory alongside it, an online converter would fail to load them unless they were provided separately. Also note that Blender won't show the textures unless you set the viewport shading mode to Material Preview or Rendered. See the button outlined in red here:

This behavior dates back to X12 Beta 2. By my calculations, 1/300 in. comes out to 0.085 mm, so between 8 and 9. With the rounding involved, slightly larger line weights than that may round down to match a line weight of 1. As an additional restriction, the line will never be thinner than one "dot" at your given DPI setting, e.g. 1/150 in. at 150 DPI.

There's a hard-coded minimum line width of about 1/300 in. for PDFs (when using "Chief Architect Save As PDF") in order to mitigate issues where zero-width lines would come through as extremely faint in many PDF viewers.

Technically speaking, MacOS is a UNIX derivative, but not really Linux; it uses the XNU kernel instead of the Linux kernel, and many of its userspace utilities are either BSD-derived (rather than the GNU utilities that most Linux distributions use) or proprietary. It's more similar to Linux than Windows is, but the parts that are most relevant to Chief Architect (especially the GUI components) are still radically different from MacOS. I'm an avid Linux user myself, but despite recent improvements and slowly growing market share, it's not really the "year of the Linux desktop" yet. I wouldn't call a Linux port impossible, but it'll likely be a significant amount of time before such a project begins to make sense from a practical perspective.

That's likely due to the computational cost of encoding the final video file.

It's possible to override this behavior if you open the library object for specification and change the type on the Options panel.

If you're using a font that doesn't actually have an italic variant installed, trying to make some instances of that font italic can cause issues when printing. You may want to look in the system font settings (Start → Settings → Personalization → Fonts) to see if the font you're trying to use has an italic face.

GPU issues like this often involve very specific hardware/software combinations that are extremely difficult to reliably replicate. We can run tests all day on a Windows 11 machine with a GTX 1050, but the chance that it'll behave the same as your machine with your GTX 1050 is slim to none. It's frustrating for both us and our customers, but it's an unfortunate reality in the world of graphics programming. We're well aware of these techniques and use them where appropriate. These "Device Removed" errors are a specific class of error that is nearly impossible to recover from without restarting the entire rendering subsystem, which is an extremely complicated operation. As far as reporting goes, our rendering team has found that even a full stack trace and all the diagnostic information we're able to glean from the GPU drivers is rarely enough to reliably diagnose this kind of issue. On a system with correctly functioning hardware and drivers, a userspace process should be completely unable to cause a blue-screen condition; the operating system is, by design, responsible for preventing any operations that would lead to one. Any case where an application can trigger such a condition is a driver or hardware problem. There may sometimes be a corresponding bug in the software that triggers the driver bug, but in many cases, the software isn't doing anything technically "wrong"; it just encounters a condition that the drivers were supposed to handle correctly but failed to do so. We've found that trying a variety of driver versions sometimes fixes these issues, but it's still a hit-or-miss process.

For cases where you've got a specific action you're trying to carry out in a specific plan, and the software consistently performs more slowly than you'd expect, it's generally best to submit a case to our tech support team with the plan file and full details on how to trigger the slowdown. Especially in cases like this where it's just hanging for a few seconds after a specific operation in a plan view, there's often analysis we can perform with our debugging tools to isolate the cause.

This sounds like a known issue in X12 on Macs with Retina displays. Using a non-Retina screen (or possibly reducing your screen resolution) may help. Another workaround is to take a screenshot of the PDF in the Preview app and import that into your plan as an image. If what you're experiencing is in fact the issue I'm thinking of, it's also fixed in X13.

We do keep debugging maps on hand for precisely this scenario, and they're often quite helpful for at least narrowing down where to look for the issue.

If you print a view with just CAD in it, you should generally get a vector PDF. There are some things that will add raster elements to the PDF, such as: Embedded raster images Other PDFs embedded in the plan/layout Camera/elevation views (except for plot-line views without color fill) CAD with transparent lines/fills (when not using Chief Architect Print to PDF)

It looks to me like this is already possible. Binding "Straight Exterior Wall" to "W, Space" and "Curved Exterior Wall" to "W, C, Space" works as I'd expect it to on my machine. Of course, this requires manually customizing your hotkeys.

In that case, if you can get away with it, I'd just use soffits. They're a little clunkier to edit, but at least in real life, a non-recessed tray ceiling is basically just a soffit.

The issue is that the ceiling finish in the family room and the hallway is different from the ceiling finish in the dining room and kitchen, as you can see if you delete the tray ceiling: Tray ceilings will "flood fill" into adjacent rooms through invisible walls if the ceiling heights are the same. This is useful for non-recessed tray ceilings, but it's admittedly less useful for recessed ones. Changing the ceiling material in those rooms to all be the same color would fix the warning. Alternatively, if you want to keep the color difference, you can use the "Explode Tray Ceiling" command to break the tray ceiling polyline down into its component ceiling planes and then pull back the large "outer" ceiling plane that has overflowed into the adjacent rooms:

Ouch. Having spent an hour this morning on the phone with my Internet provider, I feel your pain. We don't have an official list, unfortunately, although I'd like to see us provide something like that in the future. (I'm not the one who manages that sort of thing, though). We generally try to keep an eye on the forums and note issues that our customers are running into, though (gotta do something while the code is building!), so dropping a thread here or contacting the support team, although perhaps not the most expedient solution in all cases, is probably your best bet for the time being when Chief behaves in a way that seems unexpected.

There's a known issue in X13 (sorry, my fault!) where form fields in editable PDFs won't render correctly. I'm working on a fix. In the meantime, you may be able to work around the issue by opening the PDF in your preferred PDF viewer, printing it to another PDF, and importing that into Chief.

As currently designed, tray ceilings will "flow through" invisible walls, with the main goal being to allow tray ceilings to span multiple rooms. Exploding the tray ceiling is probably the easiest way to override that behavior in this case, at least if you're planning to recess it into the ceiling structure above it.

The tray ceiling has automatically "overflowed" from the dining area into the kitchen and the great room because all three rooms have the same ceiling elevation. If you set all three rooms to use the same ceiling finish, the error will go away. Alternatively, you can explode the tray ceiling and "cut back" the large ceiling plane to fit in just one room.

The resolution after import will depend in part on whether your PDF contains vector data (lines, arcs, etc.) or raster data (i.e. scanned images). As a general rule, if it doesn't look sharp when you zoom in using another PDF viewer, it won't look sharp in Chief. If you have a PDF that does look sharp in other viewers but is pixelated in Chief, that can sometimes happen in X12 and prior versions for particularly complicated PDFs. The best workaround for now is to convert the PDF to a high-resolution image using external software and then import that image into Chief.