Dermot

See if this knowledge base article helps. If not, I would recommend that you contact tech support. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-03064/live-views-on-layout-appear-blurry.html

I don't believe this is possible. I would recommend that you contact technical support for more help.

Yes. Try the following: - Create a new plan and draw a single wall. - Place a switch on the wall and then select it. - Use the Open Symbol tool. - Go to the Options panel and change it from "Wall Mounted" to "Floor Mounted". - Use the Add to Library tool to add your new switch to your user library. Anytime you need to place a switch that is not connected to a wall, use your new floor mounted one from your user library. You can also create your own custom toolbar button to place your switch using a "Place Library Object" button.

Ronald, I believe your particular problem is related to your video card. Unfortunately, it looks like updating the drivers does not solve this particular problem. One possible solution would be to adjust your Render Preferences and turn your Hardware Edge Smoothing to either High or None. We were only able to repro this problem on one machine with this setting on Low.

You can edit stair sections separately by selecting the stair section while holding down either the control key or shift key. You can tell that you are editing only one section when the stair dialog only lists the one section instead of all of the connected ones. By default the program will try to keep the start and end heights the same for T-shaped stair configurations. This will not work well when you have two different heights. You can override this behavior by turning off the automatic heights when needed. You should be able to draw the existing stair using the automatic heights and then turn them off for the new section to specify whatever start and end height you need.

"I don't want line weights displayed but I do want the line type displayed correctly." As far as I know, the only way to show the line style the way that it will actually print is to either turn on Line Weights or Print Preview. What is surprising to me is that, as far as I know, no one has ever asked for this even though it seems like this might be a good way to work. Glenn's work around of setting up a layer set with all your line weights set to 1 would probably work for you but I doubt you would want to use this layer set when printing or sending to layout. Regarding dimension and label sizes, the preference settings shown in the 3rd post will let you specify a minimum size for your dimensions and labels shown on the screen. This allows you to zoom way out and still be able to see and modify your dimensions which can be very useful. What might not be so obvious is that there is also a maximum size for dimensions shown on the screen. This is useful for when you zoom way in so that you can still use your dimensions. I don't think there is a way to modify the max size or turn it off unless you are in Print Preview mode. If you would like the program to work differently, then you should probably send in an actual feature request.

Try toggling the tool for showing line weights. This tool also affects the line style display.

I think this depends on how the cad file was setup. If the objects you are importing are using "by layer", then you can use the Advanced Layer Mapping tool in the Import Drawing Wizard to map them to whatever Chief layers you like. This should give you fairly good control over what layers the objects will be assigned to and what they look like in Chief. If the objects are using "by object", then they will come in using whatever color the original designer thought they needed to be. Currently, there is no way to override this at import time. Seems like the ability to automatically reset imported objects to use "by layer" might be a useful feature. As far as I know, no one has ever asked for this.

I have not heard of any problems with this tool. I just tried it and it works fine for me. Did you select all of the layer sets that you want to import? When you get the Import Layer Sets dialog box, you need to either shift-click or control-click all of the layer sets that you want to import otherwise you will probably only import the currently selected one. If this is still not working for you then you probably need to contact tech support for more help. They will need more info from you describing exactly what steps you are doing and what windows you have open at the time you are doing it.

This is mostly likely the result of video card or driver issues. See this tech article regarding these kind of issues: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems.html If this does not help you solve your problems, then you should contact technical support on Monday.

As already mentioned, we don't have 24/7 tech support. We are just not that big of a company and we don't believe in outsourcing our tech support. If we did, you would probably get far worse tech support then you do now. Also, I don't work on weekends or respond to direct requests on Chieftalk. Of course, by posting this on a Sunday, you know that this is not entirely true. As far as your issue is concerned, what you are showing on your screen makes no sense to me. You are obviously in a bad state. The layer set drop down on your main toolbar should always match what shows in either the ALDO or the normal LDO. If exiting Chief and rebooting the computer does not magically fix the problem, then you will need to send your plan into technical support so that we can diagnose what is going on. It will probably take a developer working within the debugger to see what is really going on under the hood.

By default, any camera that is "active" will always display in plan view even if the layer is turned off. This is so you can tell where the camera is and make modifications to it directly from plan views. You can disable this feature using Eric's suggestion of turning off "Always Display Active Cameras". If your only concern is sending a plan to someone else and them getting confused by all the cameras, just turning off the camera's layer is probably all you need to do. When they open the plan, there will not be any active cameras so it's pretty much a non-issue. For those of you who like to bring your old templates forward, you can always see what the default current system layer names are by using the Reset Names button on the Layer Display Options dialog.

I hate to sound like Captain Obvious here but the short answer is because no one asked us to. I just searched our internal database and I could not find any reports of anyone ever asking us to do this. People ask us to do lots of things, and asking doesn't guarantee we will get to it anytime soon, but not asking probably means it's not ever going to happen. Please remember that discussing something on this forum is not the same as making an actual feature request or reporting a bug to us. We don't have anyone here who's job it is to read every post. Sometimes people like myself will read random posts and comment on them when we have extra time. We also have moderators who look for forum issues (like spam) but not program issues. If you want to report a problem to us, you should always contact technical support. If you want to make a feature request, you should make a post on the suggestions forum here: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/forum/8-suggestions/

I have not heard of anyone else having any problems like this. If you create a new layer in one layer set, it should show up in every other layer set, always. And what exactly to you mean by it showing up "corrupted"? I would highly recommend that you work with tech support regarding these issues. They will need a sample plan that demonstrates the problem and the exact steps you are using to see the problems. For example, there are several different ways to create new layers so you need to be very clear about explaining what you are doing.

Please read my answers regarding bringing you older plans forward on your other post here: Just to clarify, you can run a 32 bit application on a 64 bit OS. You can't run a 64 bit application on a 32 bit OS. This does not mean that you will have much luck trying to run V9.5 on a newer system though. There are lots of other compatibility issues mostly with things like hardware lock and video card drivers. If you do a search on this forum, you should be able to find some posts related to running older versions on Windows 7. I know some people were somewhat successful at getting them to work but maybe not with any versions as old as V9.5. Personally, I wouldn't even try. If you are determined not to upgrade, then you would probably have more luck finding an older computer that is still running an older version of Windows on Ebay.

"Do I have to buy it again or can I use it as is as long as I want?" You will be able to use X9 as long as you want to. This is assuming that you have a computer that will still run it. We can't do much to make old software run on newer computer systems (that's the job of the OS) and we can't do anything to make sure your old computer will run forever. The only thing that stops in 12 months is your first year of SSA. The SSA program includes free upgrades, training videos, technical support, and bonus library content. More info about the SSA program can be found here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/ssa/ "And to make it worse, the new Chief won't load my 9.5 projects." X9 will only read plan files that were written by version 10 and newer. If you decide to purchase X9, tech support should be able to provide you with a solution to convert your older files though. All you really need to do is get the X8 Client Viewer (or any other version of Chief from V10 to X8) and you will be able to open these older plans and save them in a format that X9 will be able to read. Since they are so old, you should expect to have to do some amount of manual cleanup. We have worked very hard to make sure that when you bring plans forward that they do so with very minimal changes but when you bring these plans forward you will have to deal with all of the minor changes that have happed over the 10 versions you missed.

That feature is not new in X9. My guess is that you started with a plan or template that was pretty old. It's been a long time since the default was set to 4 panels.

OK, I'm a little confused, why do you want to display insulation in a railing? This is not something I have seen before. Currently, normal railings do not display the information for the wall type. Solid railings (or half walls) will display the wall type. In a normal railing, the wall type is mostly used for situations where your railing creates a portion of a wall either above or below the railing and normally does not display in plan view. Normal railings can display the railing details though. If you want to include a fill style for the railing components you can do this by changing the fill style in the Plan Display section of the Newel/Baluster panel of the Railing Specification dialog. You can also use a wall hatch on a railing. There are no defaults for the wall hatch tool. If you need to change the fill style for your wall hatching, just place them all and then marque select them to change them all at once. Also, the plan you posted has the "Walls, Layers" layer turned off in display options. Even normal wall types will not display fill styles when the wall layers are turned off.

Michael, It looks like all of your problems are with ray trace views. I don't think any of the changes made to render views and the any of their new settings will affect your ray trace views. In fact very little has been changed with ray tracing compared to X8. You probably won't get any different results if you go back to X8. If you do, then I would recommend that you start looking at your ray trace configuration settings, not your render view settings. The bottom line is that ray tracing is complicated. If you are determined to get good results with ray trace views, I would recommend that you start by watching all of the training videos first. Then you should probably read all of the older threads on this forum to see how others have solved similar problems. If all else fails, you may want to contact technical support for more assistance.

Yes, see some examples of things I have designed entirely in Chief below. Depending on what you are trying to design, this can be quite easy or quite difficult but almost always possible using native Chief tools. If your pieces are mostly rectangular case goods, it should be fairly easy. If you have any compound curves or complex shapes, then things can get much more complicated. The armoire below was very easy but If I had wanted it to have an arched top it would have been much more difficult. In general, you will find that the cabinet tools are very flexible and easily adaptable to a wide variety of furniture pieces. Think of them more as building blocks instead of just as cabinets. Don't forget that it is pretty easy to design almost any molding shape and apply them in many different places to get more accurate details. I will also make custom parts in separate plans just to build into symbols for the various components.

It all depends on what message you are talking about. If the message has a check box that says "Do not show this message again this session", then the message will come back the next time you run the program. If the message has a check box that says "Do not show this message again", then the message should go away until you use the "Reset Message Boxes" tool in your Preferences dialog. If this is not working for you, then you should probably contact technical support.

These are all textures and images that are used by your library objects. If you remove them, you may have problems with library objects and will likely see errors about missing files. You should probably not remove anything from the ProgramData folder manually. This data is installed by the program or gets put there when you download libraries. If you wish to remove any of your libraries, you will usually want to do this from within the program.

The label positions are not dynamic defaults. This means that if you change them in your window defaults, the existing windows in your plan will not automatically update. You should be able to group select all of your windows (using the marquee select while in window mode) and change them all at once on the label panel of the window specification dialog.

Another option you might want to consider is the rental program. For $199 a month, you will get access to the current version X9, SSA (which allows you to get technical support, all of the newest libraries, and training videos), and people on this forum are going to have an easier time helping you . If you continue to get more work and stick with the rental, it will convert into a full license after 16 months. You can also stop the rental program at any time for any reason. For more info about the rental program, check out these FAQ's: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/software-rental/

Technically, you don't need to use annotation sets to get what you want. Annotation sets are a very powerful tool but I always suggest that people think of them as a quick way of changing your current defaults. The important thing is to understand how your dimension defaults work. All you really need is to have two different dimension defaults. You can setup the dimension defaults in either your Defaults Settings or Active Defaults dialog. Once you have the two dimension defaults that you need, you then need to make sure they are being used in your CAD details. If you want to draw a dimension using a particular dimension default, just make sure that it is active in the Active Defaults dialog before drawing any new dimensions. If you want to change an already drawn dimension to use a different default, just open the Dimension Specification dialog and change the dimension default.