Dermot

It's great to see how excited people are about our next version of Room Planner. All I know is that the Android version of Room Planner is still in development but is expected to be released some time this quarter. Which I guess means anytime in the next 3 months (assuming it isn't delayed again). I also know that if you would like a tablet that will run Chief Architect Premier right now then you should consider purchasing a Microsoft Surface instead.

I think a lot of people find perspective cameras less confusing then the orthographic ones since they tend to look more natural. As for placing furniture, or any other playing around in the plan, your client could purchase one of our Home Designer products. You would need to turn on the checkbox for "Allow Editing in Select Home Designer Products" in the General Plan Defaults for them to make any changes. You could also lock any layers for things you don't want the client to change. I would recommend that you only send him copies of your plans and never replace your original with the one he has been playing around in. It would be very easy for your client to accidently make changes you really don't want to have to fix up.

The client viewer uses the default hotkeys for any tools that are available in the viewer. The client viewer does not have the ability to customize hotkeys. Did you want to send him your custom hotkeys or let him customize his own? Currently, the client viewer does not allow changing layer sets. It will open a plan, camera, or detail with what ever layer set you saved it with. We did this to give you more control over what the client could see but I'm not sure how useful this is. You could always send the client a layout page with as many different plan views using different layer sets as you want and have him open them from the layout. You may want to submit a feature request to add layer set control to the client viewer. The client should already be able to add text and arrow lines to the plan and send it back to you.

Are you using a deck railing or a normal railing? There is some automatic behavior associated with using a deck railing where the program will always create a deck room. If you don't want deck rooms, then you should probably use the normal railing tool instead.

We don't typically use a stop watch to time the program. Brian only used it to time Perry's video. It's not a very precise method but it certainly works much better then counting. To get more accurate timing, you can go into your preferences and turn on "Show Screen Redraw Time" in your status bar. You can do this in both X6 and X7 and compare the numbers. Timing can be very subjective unless you have an accurate method of measuring it. This is why we have tools built into the program which take much of the guess work out of it.

This is not something we can diagnose on this forum. You need to work directly with tech support.

In general, X7 should be fairly close to X6 on most machines. We have found a number of cases where it is faster and some more obscure ones where it is slower. We made lots of changes to our rendering engine so that it uses different technology under-the-hood than X6 did. This is why some video cards were having problems crashing (but we think we have fixed that with the release of the latest update). This may also explain why some people are seeing some performance differences and others are not. Some cards may not support the new technology as well as they supported the old technology. You may be able to adjust some of your render preferences to improve the performance on your particular machine. If you are still finding performance problems where you think X7 is not as fast as X6, then please feel free to report these directly to our tech support team. These may be the result of changes to our 3D engine but they could also be the result of some other programming changes that caused unintentional slow downs. We found a number of these during the beta that have been corrected for the release. It is possible that there are others that no one has reported to us yet. Please be sure to include all of the specs for your machine, video card, and OS with these reports. Please be sure to include an example plan along with clear explanations of where you are seeing the slow downs. In an ideal world, your sample plan would be an X6 plan so that we could make a direct comparison of the speed differences between X7 and X6. Even if you don't have an X6 plan, you should still report any problems. We will still look into the problem to see if there are any improvements that can be made.

Although it is possible to modify the graphics files that are installed with Chief, it is definitely not recommended. Replacing the installed files with different ones could cause missing file errors, slower loading times, increased memory usage, performance problems, and who knows what else. If you start experiencing any problems after doing this, the first thing you should do is uninstall and reinstall the program to restore the original graphics files.

It sounds like you might be crashing because of problems with your graphics card. Ryan posted this in another thread: We are hoping to release an update with this fix as soon as possible.

Please be aware that this thread was originally started when X7 was still in beta testing. Since then we have fixed a number of problems that would have resulted in crashes as well as slow downs. The X7 release should be much better then the beta with regards to both of these issues. If you are still experiencing any crashes or slow downs, please report these problems directly to our tech support team. They will need to get more information from you regarding your system, what it is you are doing, and the plans you are working with. Usually, these are not the kind of issues that can be resolved based on random comments made on a forum.

All of the library furniture and fixture objects have a 2D cad block assigned to them. If you place the 3D object into a plan, you can then insert the 2D block into the plan using the Cad Block Management dialog. You could then delete the original object and keep the block. I'm not sure why you want to do this though. It would be much easier to just turn off the display of the 3D object in your camera views if you don't want to see it.

If you are getting a release assertion message, then this is more likely the result of a programming bug. I would really encourage you to work directly with our tech support team to properly diagnose this problem so that we get a fix into the next available update. Since you are the first person that has discussed this problem then it might be something that is unique to your way of working or something else in your setup. Also, if you ever do get a release assertion, you should first click on the "Show Details" button and do a screen capture of the full message and save the image. Second, you should then always click on the "Send Report" button which will send some of the low level details to us which can sometimes help us diagnose the problem even without any other information. Once you have done both of those, and assuming you have the time and willingness to do this, you should then try and see if you can repeat the problem. If you can repeat the problem, then it is much more likely that we will be able to duplicate the problem which means it will be much more likely that we can fix the problem. In any case, you should still work with tech support so that they can gather what ever information they can to help us fix the problem. Also, they can sometimes help you find a work around for the problem which will allow you to work without more interruptions until we can solve the problem on our end.

If the crash happens with all plans, then it might be a system related problem. If the crash happens with just one particular plan, then it might be a program bug. You should report these kinds of problems to tech support and be sure to include the plan that is having the problem.

I think this is a bug, but only sort of. It is basically a z-fighting problem. The cabinet shelves are fighting with the door panel because they are too close together. It is very obvious when you have frameless cabinets (because we bring the shelves out to the front of the cabinet instead of to the back of the face frame) and with the default door symbol (because it has a very thin panel that is only about 1/16" thick). There are several ways for you to solve this problem: 1. Use a different door style (hopefully one that has a panel that is thicker then 1/16" thick). 2. Use a face frame cabinet. 3. Adjust the shelf depth so that they are not so close to the door panel. 4. Remove the shelves from the cabinet. 5. Report it to tech support. Things like this will get more attention if people actually report it to tech support instead of just talk about it on Chieftalk. The good news is that I don't think it will show up in standard rendered views or when you send your views to layout pages.

Lots of discussion here about how to correct the problem. The simplest and most reliable way to correct the problem is to close and then reopen both your layout and plan. As far as I know this will always work and anything else is only a maybe. If this does not solve the problem, then please submit a bug report to tech support right away before you do anything else. My main concern is figuring out how people are getting into this state. It does not happen to everyone and for the people it does happen to, it does not seem to happen all the time. It might be related to something these people do that most other people are not doing. I suspect that it could have something to do with either doing a "save as" on a plan or relinking the layout to a different version of a plan. For anyone that has ever encountered this problem, please try to remember what you did before the problem showed up and see if it was related to something like this.

To the best of my knowledge, the problem you are describing is not a new problem in X7. I have seen this problem discussed on the forums in the past, but so far we have never been able to figure out what is causing this problem. In every case that we have seen, simply saving the layout and the plan and then reopening it has always corrected the problem. This makes the problem very difficult to fix because if someone sends us a layout, it always looks fine. What we really need are the steps that will create the problem. If anyone can figure out the exact steps needed to put you into a state where your plan view and layout do not match, then please report this problem directly to our tech support team. You can contact support through this web page: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/#contact

You lost me Joe. I can see where it might be useful to have the floor number be available as a Ruby attribute. We could even make it available as part of the object label macros. Sounds like a reasonable feature request. I don't understand how you would use this to solve Angela's problem though. You can already display the floor number in it's own column in the schedule. You can already setup the schedule to only display the objects on a single floor. You just don't have a good way of overriding Chief's automatic numbering system used by the schedules. How would the macro help with this?

Currently, there is no way to specify a starting number for a schedule. This sounds like it might make a good feature request though. You can change the "D" to "D1" for the schedule on the first floor and "D2" for the one on the second floor. You could also change the "D" to a different letter or the callout shape to something different for each floor. Either way, it could help make sure there was no confusion over the numbers being the same on each floor. Maybe some other people have some other ideas.

That message is not good. You either have a bad install, a system problem (often video card related), or a corrupt plan. It is unlikely that anyone on this forum can help you. You should contact technical support: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/#contact

I would like to clarify some of my earlier comments since I am not sure everyone understood what I was saying or why. Please do not assume that any discussions that you might have on this forum are somehow going to result in a bug report or feature request getting logged into our internal database. Chieftalk is not a part of our Technical Support or Customer Service departments. It's a free web forum we provide as an extra benefit that is designed primarily for our customers to communicate with each other. It is not the best way to communicate with us. Contacting Technical Support or Customer Service directly (by phone, email, or through our online support center) is always going to be the best way to communicate with us. We only moderate this forum on a limited basis to make sure it is not taken over by spam or to remove any other posts that are not suitable for a company sponsored forum. You do not need SSA to participate in this forum. SSA provides many other benefits including priority technical support and access to our large collection of training videos. If you have SSA, you should take full advantage of these services. Posting something on Chieftalk does not make you a customer of Chief Architect. This forum is currently open to anyone, including people that have never actually purchased one of our products. Chief Architect employees only participate on this forum on a strictly volunteer basis. As part of the engineering team, I have no special customer service skills or training. I occasionally read posts that look interesting to me. On rare occasions, I will post information that I think might be helpful to others. I sometimes read Chieftalk when I am at home or when I have limited time and access to our internal databases. I will not log bug reports or feature requests for you. I will be more then happy to explain to you how you can do this yourself. If you decide not to, I can only assume that the issue was really not that important to you. I would like to thank Joe for contacting our support department and making sure his feedback was logged.

Robert, For more info, please reread Dan's sticky post: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/21-forum-guidelines/

Framing labels will always display "width X depth" for beams or "width1 X width2" for posts. You can specify a different order by using a custom label (with or without using the available label macros). If you would like Chief to work differently, then please remember that the Q&A forum is not an appropriate place to request features or report bugs. Currently, we have not received any of either so you should not expect any additional changes.

There was a post tool in X6 and prior. It sometimes created a post with a footing and sometimes did not. X7 has a separate Post tool and a Post with Footing tool which gives you better control over whether or not you get a footing.

You can already set the label defaults for posts and beams. If you would like to set them for other framing types, you should submit a feature request.

It's probably not a problem with your video card (assuming you are running at the maximum screen resolution). In X6, you can only send camera views to the layout at your current screen resolution. So you really can't do any better then making the camera view full screen. You can specify the image size for raytrace views so you can make them as you like and then send that to layout. In X7, you will be able to send camera views to layout at higher resolutions. The public beta for X7 will begin on Jan 20th and you should be able to try it for yourself then.