Dermot

This is the way Chief was designed to work. It's remembering the room that used to be there even though you deleted all of the walls. When you draw the new walls your new room just inherits all of the settings from the old room. I understand that this can sometimes be confusing. I would love to make this less confusing but it's not always easy. Over the years we've tweaked the code to try and be smarter about when we keep rooms and when we toss them. There are probably more improvements we could make. Maybe we shouldn't remember the room when there are no walls in cases like this? Maybe we could have a manual tool for clearing out any temporary room data? As always, feel free to report these kinds of issues so that we are aware of them and can try and figure out ways to improve them.

The "rules" regarding rooms are a little bit fuzzy but I will try to explain some of the more confusing ones. Rooms are formed automatically when walls are connected to enclose a space. New rooms will usually pick up all of their settings from your Floor Defaults. Floor defaults can be different for every floor and are always set when the floor is first created. If you change any settings in your floor defaults, you may need to also change them on the other floors that have already been built. The program does not like "island" rooms (interior rooms where the walls are not connected to any outer walls). We will automatically connect island rooms using invisible walls to prevent any problems but you can turn this behavior off it you want. If you do not connect your island rooms, you may see problems with your floors, ceilings, room moldings, and probably more. If you remove a wall, disconnect one, or mark a wall as "no room definition", then technically you would no longer have a room and you would lose all of the settings for the room. The settings I am talking about are pretty much everything that is in the Room Specification dialog. Since it is really common to temporarily remove or disconnect walls while editing plans, we keep rooms around for "awhile" while you are working. How long we keep them around is a little bit ambiguous but I know if you save and reopen the plan any temporarily rooms will be gone forever. Another thing that happens is that if you divide a room by drawing walls to form two rooms, the new room will usually be a copy of the original room. So if you split a bedroom into two rooms, they will probably both be bedrooms. This is normally a good thing but can sometimes be inconvenient when trying to create something like a closet space. Another thing that can be confusing is what happens when you move walls. If you move a wall that is dividing two rooms by a small amount, the rooms should always keep their current settings. If you move a wall by too much though, then you may lose the settings for one room and make a copy of the other room instead. In the picture below, the right side shows what happens if you move the interior wall up by too much. Instead of getting a large bath and small bedroom, you will lose the bath and get two bedrooms. I think this has something to do with the fact that we keep track of the rooms before and after every wall move and it's not always easy to determine what the new rooms should be. If you find situations where you lose your room settings where you feel you shouldn't, then please feel free to report these to tech support. We are always looking for ways to improve these kinds of things.

In X6 and prior, you could only create rendered images that were screen resolution or less. You could also create raytraced images that were much larger then the screen. In X7, we added the ability to choose the resolution of your rendered images when using the Export Picture tool. You would have to first export the rendered view at the resolution you wanted and then import the image on to your layout page to use this feature. In X8, we added the ability to send any rendered view to layout as a Live View. Live views are designed to look good when they are printed. Live views may be displayed on the screen using a much smaller resolution in order to speed up working with your layouts. If you zoom in and notice that the view is pixelated or blurry, you might try the Update View button to improve how it looks on the screen. In general, this is not necessary because the live view will always be updated to an appropriate resolution when you print your layout.

It is always our goal to make it so that legacy plans and templates will come into the latest version with out having to do any significant work. If you ever have a legacy plan that looks fine in an older version but doesn't look right in the latest version, then please report this to our technical support team. Please be sure and include the original legacy plan along with a clear description of what is not working the same. You can report these kinds of problems here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/#contact

Have you tried the Transform/Replicate tool?

Your template plans were either installed by or saved with the beta version. Updating the beta version to the release version will not automatically update your templates, even if you uninstall and reinstall the program. If you are using your own custom templates, then you just need to open them and save them with the most current release version. If you are only using the templates that were installed with Chief, you can just rename your templates folder. When you next run the program, it will automatically copy the newer templates that were installed into your new templates folder. If you need more help, contact tech support.

Your preferences are corrupt. If you delete that file, then the program will automatically create new preferences for you when you launch it again. If you continue to have problems, then please contact technical support.

As far as I can tell, no one has reported this bug to us yet. It sounds very much like it is something unique in your plan since no one else has been able to reproduce it. When these types of problems don't get reported, then it is much less likely they will get fixed. Please report these kinds of problems directly to tech support instead of just discussing them on this forum. Be sure to also include your template plan along with clear step-by-step instructions for how you get the crash. Instructions for how to contact support are here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/#contact Why not just draw the revision cloud instead? There are two ways to create a revision cloud. One way is to select one or more objects and use the edit tool to automatically form a cloud around them. The other way is to just draw a revision cloud similar to how you would draw a normal polyline. It seems to me that creating a cloud around a different object, moving it, and then resizing it would be the harder way.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what this means. Maybe you could clarify?

You don't need to use custom counter tops to remove the automatic radius. Just open your base cabinet default and set your counter top corner treatment to "none".

If your molding is really a polyline solid, and you are not using the 18.3 update, then you should download the update and use it. We fixed a bug having to do with rotating polyline solids using edit area. I could not find any problems with moldings when rotating a plan using edit area in 18.3. If you are still having problems with the 18.3 update, you should submit a bug report to tech support so that we can evaluate it further.

We adjusted the default hot keys that ship with X8. Too many new users would accidently turn off angle snaps and then wonder why nothing worked right. As a general rule, I would not recommend working with angle snaps turned off except in very special cases. You can always use the Customize Hotkeys feature to add this back in. You could also bring your X7 custom hotkeys into X8.

We assumed that no one would ever want their trusses to start at "0" and changed them all to start at "1" in X8. We made a mistake by not adjusting the labels on legacy plans when bringing them into X8. We will look into putting in a fix for this but I have no idea when that might be available. There are several ways you can deal with this problem for now: - You can continue to work on the plan in X7 instead of bringing it into X8. - You can manually edit the truss labels in X8 to display whatever you want it to display. - You can use a custom macro in X8 to show the same label that X7 would have (using Michael's method mentioned above). I would encourage you to always report problems like this directly to tech support. Discussing problems on the forums is not the same as reporting them.

Support does not read this forum looking for bug reports. This web page explains how to contact support: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/

"...and TR-4 became the next number not used which was TR-23." I have not seen that before. Please report this as a bug to technical support and we will look into this more.

No trusses should have been removed or changed. The automatic truss labels started with "TR-0" in X7 and will now start with "TR-1" in X8. You can also manually specify any label you want for a truss the same way that you would other objects. Select the truss in plan view and go to the label panel to make manual changes.

The original poster said that the first response was correct. There are lots of reasons why a person might not see the foundation. Here are some of them listed in order of most likely to least likely: - they are using a floor camera instead of a full camera (a floor overview can also be set to show lower floors or not). - they have the foundation layer turned off - they have no foundation floor - they have nothing on their foundation floor - everything on their foundation is turned off through layers - everything on their foundation is hidden by some other method such as using invisible walls or materials - their computer is possessed by demonic forces - any combination of the above

The world is a mysterious place. Apparently, Michael got the right answer but Joe got the credit? As for the mystery "foundation" layer, the main reason we still have it is that it has been there for a very long time and if we got rid of it someone would complain. We originally put it in the program because some versions of our consumer products would not show foundations in some views. In order to keep compatibility with our professional products we decided to control the display using layers. I'm really not sure it's still needed but it might be convenient in some cases? I would bet that the majority of people that know about it are the ones that have accidently turned it off.

Or you have the foundation layer turned off in your layer display options.

Jerry is correct. Your casing overlap will affect your lintel position even if your casing is turned off. It probably shouldn't. If you set your casing overlap to 0 and are still having problems, then you need to post a plan or talk with tech support.

Joey, Sorry if I am being dense here, but what are you talking about? I thought your problem was the shutters. Chief already gives you full control over shutter position and size so as far as I can tell there is nothing that needs fixing here. Regarding the lintel and sill, as far as I can tell the program builds these the same. If your "extend" is set to 0", then these will stop at the edge of the window. You can also adjust either the lintel or sill by specifying a +- value for the extend. There is also an option for wrapping but I don't believe that does anything unless you are using a custom profile. Again, I don't know of anything here that is not working correct so I'm still not sure what needs fixing. Maybe you could explain the problem better or post a plan?

There should be no need to place your shutters manually. Take a look at the shutters panel in the window dialog. You already have full control over the position and size of the shutters. The only thing you can't do is control the offset from the wall but I don't think you need this.

Just to clarify... I have almost zero input as to who Chief Architect hires outside of the development team, how Chief Architect markets it's products, or any other business decisions. I trust the people making these decisions to do what's best for the company, it's employees, and it's customers. I have very limited input over the features that we work on, probably not nearly as much as most of you assume. I am only one member on a team of people that determine the prioritized list of features we work on for each new version. I give my input just like everyone else but ultimately this is a business decision. In my opinion, there is no need for us to have an architect on staff (although we have had one in the past). This is not because I don't think architects have valuable input. It's because we pretty much already know what architects want. We have lots of customers who are architects who have already given us this information. We already use this information to help us determine our priorities. We didn't improve the plan view display of stairs and railings in X8 to help builders, remodelers, K&B designers, DIY's, or any of our other customers. We put this in specifically to address a long standing and important need for architects. What we did was largely influenced by the architects who were on our X7 beta team (thanks to all those that participated, including you Richard). We will continue to solicit more information from our current customers when we need to. We currently have over 6000 open feature requests in our database. Every year this number grows instead of shrinks. We don't need to hire anyone to tell us what to work on. I would much rather see us hire more software engineers so that we could do more.

Power users are not preventing any needed changes in Chief. They really have no more influence than any of our other customers. The people that have the most influence are the ones that have figured out how to report bugs and feature requests properly and then do so regularly. This is the best way to ensure that the things that you think are important will have the highest chance of getting addressed sooner rather than later. The people that also volunteer their valuable time to participate in the alpha and beta tests to make sure any problems that they find are fixed early have an added edge over everyone else. You do not need to be a power user to participate in either one, you just need to be willing to work with us. The people who discuss problems on this forum (especially the ones that just want to complain) and then never bother to report them to us are probably not going to have much influence at all. A number of our power users have already figured this out, but not all of them. We don't really need to have an architect on staff to figure out what to do. As long as we have customers that are telling us what they want, then we will try to work on those things, regardless of their background. The more people that ask for something the more likely it will move up on our priority list. It's really pretty simple.

You can also turn off "Flush Mounted" on the Options panel in the Symbol Specification dialog (use Open Symbol and not Open Object).