HumbleChief

To continue my string of embarrassing posts I am still struggling to understand Chief's structure dbx and cannot figure out this latest behavior. I am trying to lower the floor of the garage to -12" but it seems to lower the floors on all the other rooms. I've never seen this before and am wondering what simple setting I am missing? Is Chief 'remembering' a setting somehow? How can changing the floor height in one room change all the other floor heights? Is that expected behavior? FLOOR HEIGHTS.plan

Yes Lew, good explanation and I think I've unwittingly benefited from the behavior you're describing but just never really understood it.

Here's another explanation of the (beneficial in my opinion) behavior from Tech support. The reason, simply put: the program remembers various room settings. As stated, these settings can be flushed, for example, by deleting the Foundation and starting over -- deleting the Foundation floor with Auto Rebuild on will not just clear the foundation floor, but delete the entire Floor 0, which is what is necessary to wipe all of this remembered information, saving and closing the plan is necessary to completely flush this type of information as well. This behavior can be seen anywhere a room is defined and is typically going to help you even though it's not apparent at the time. The intent is to remember and save data about how the rooms are defined in the event that the room definition is lost, the user won't have to waste time redefining a room because they accidentally disconnected a wall, etc. Knowing how and why it works, you can force it with expected results. For instance, if you start a brand new plan and draw a room, bisect it with an interior wall, set one room to Living and one to Family, drop the family room's Floor © value to -6", then delete the interior wall--the area will be defined by whichever room was larger, either Living or Family, and take on the settings of that room. Now, redraw the Interior wall and you will see the Living and Family rooms will be redefined as they previously were, the Living at 0" and the Family at -6". In this specific plan, the information that is being retained is actually the Floor 1 Room's "Monolithic Slab Foundation" setting, also forcing the Floor Supplied by Foundation Room Below to be set. On Floor 1, if you open the middle room, uncheck "Floor Supplied by the Foundation Room Below" and "Monolithic Slab Foundation", then delete and redraw the room, the foundation will regenerate with default stem walls. So, in this case it's not so much remembering the Foundation, but the room above's Floor settings.

Again a huge thanks for responding Dermot and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the way Chief is designed to work and it actually might be a GREAT feature - it's just not that clear to the user how that design is implemented. If I and all Chief users knew Chief was designed that way there would be no question nor any thread regarding same and I really can't think of a good way to even describe the behavior let alone define in such a way that a user manual definition would really make sense. Bottom line, I learned a little more about Chief and how it works and hope this thread helps spread some of that knowledge around. Again thanks for participating, it's not a small thing and it does not go unnoticed.

Yes I could do that (EDIT: did that and it works as it should) but still...shouldn't one expect new rooms, no matter where you draw them, be to drawn to floor/foundation defaults?

Yes that is how it works - but should it work that way? Shouldn't a user expect that if the defaults are changed that any new room would build to those defaults? And what is 'remembered'? And for how long? And in what areas? How can one know that some area of a plan will draw to defaults while others won't? That is very baffling behavior. And now that I know this I don't have to spend all the time I already spent re-building my template plan.

Tried it and I'm going to say yes it fixed it, even though I can't be sure I built over the exact same area, I tried a couple areas and the foundation built correctly after deleting the walls and closing/reopening the file. Still unexpected to my mind and has to drive a new user crazy when defaults simply stop working because Chief is 'remembering' something that no user could possibly be aware of.

Here's the phenomenon I was describing Dermot.

REALLY appreciate you taking the time to explain Dermot. I have noticed the behavior you are describing and usually find it to be not too confusing but I had a plan that would keep drawing new rooms to old room settings despite the default setting changes. If one moved off that old room area, which now had no walls, the rooms would draw to the defaults, but if new walls were drawn over that old room area the room would be drawn to the last known room spec and not the defaults. I'll spend a little time with that plan and see if I can confirm that behavior and maybe send it into tech to see if that's expected behavior - or not.

Yeah great question Glenn. If there are rules for such behavior I would also love to know what they are to add some consistency and alleviate some confusion. I was always under the impression that any time you added a new space that the new space would conform to the defaults and not 'remember' any other previous settings. If Chief does remember old settings why and in what circumstances?

I've never heard a story like SRC's and have no reason to not trust his/her version. I also haven't used a Mac in years so can't comment first hand. Both Macs and Windows machines seem to be fine for most users and I like the ability to customize a Windows machine, others do not. I rather value my hard earned cash and find there's no need to spend more on a Mac where, for me, there's no added value. Others like the culture and one company attitude and its perceived benefits, me I run from Apple for just that reason. Can you compare apples to apples with the 2 system approaches? Difficult, but generally you get more bang for your buck with a Windows machine and Chief does indeed require lots of bang.

.. same here but so hard to really document in a way that the Chief guys can fix and if the fall back is to just create a new plan each time that defeats a lot of the inherent power within Chief. I will also bet it's almost always 'user error' but a program should not be so complex that errors are the norm from a very experienced user such as myself, unless I really am as stupid as Chief can make me look/feel.

Yes and I always ignored it - till now.

Thanks Perry - that helped 'a little' but still unusable for any kind of accurate framing detail. I'll just take care of it manually.

I am working on a plan where the defaults are constantly changing in the room dbx. Numbers that seem to come out of nowhere and certainly not the defaults I have set. Take a LOT of work to get everything to play nicely. Match properties is the only solution many times.

Thanks Chop (love your avatar BTW) it's not that big a deal to manually do it all but was just wondering if there was something I was missing.

I don't use the wall framing details very often but have a condition I would like to show but Chief isn't framing that wall in a way that seems usable. As can seen in the attached pic there's all kinds of strange anomalies - header is weird; no trimmers; sill come up short etc. Is there a setting I should know about that will give a more accurate detail? Or does one just move stuff around manually? Here's the plan; WALL FRAMING 1.plan

One method that I think will clear all the old defaults is to delete the entire 'floor' and rebuild. This will then allow the defaults to drive the new structure.

...and I really think this is the point. It is VERY complicated and in my opinion overly so. Probably the price we pay to have a room base model building system but I don't think it's a price we should HAVE to pay. There are many places in Chief where the user interface exposes and reflects that internal complexity instead of masking it and making it easier for the user to understand the underlying paradigms. In the examples within this thread there are 2 very distinct behaviors based upon which plan one uses. The original plan I posted perhaps 'remembers' settings as Glenn suggests and won't build to new defaults unless those default setting are redundantly checked in each room. The profile plan I used in another example does NOT remember settings and simply rebuilds to the new defaults as they are changed. That's not 'complicated' that's inconsistent and unintuitive to a degree that the average user has no real chance of truly understanding how Chief really works. The software programming intellect within the Chief brain trust is to be admired but that intellect should be blended within a user interface that doesn't require the user to possess that same programming intellect. Best example still - when wanting the sun to be directly overhead one must enter the virtually unknowable minus 90 degrees into a dbx instead of a simple graphic showing the sun's location. Love Chief Architect but the user interface can be very very difficult to understand at times and it just doesn't have to be.

One last follow up observation and I think it is the key to the problem. If the first floor is 'deleted' instead of just the walls removed I THINK it find its way around the issues presented early on. I'll try it with plan I posted. YUP, That fixed all the weirdness and if someone runs into problems like this perhaps that will help to delete and rebuild the entire 'floor' not just delete the walls.

Exactly my MO as well, didn't notice till I had to create a different foundation.

That's pretty weird, didn't try it but that plan's going away about now.

I think I get what you're saying. A use sets up defaults for a certain structure: Chief build structures differently or are somehow altered and there should be a warning that there are structures that don't match your defaults? Not sure that's what you mean but that warning would have gone off in my first plan and I would be alerted that some structures are not matching the defaults? That would be great if that's what you're talking about.

Hey Johnny, Check the end of that last video. There actually is a warning of sorts that I didn't realize was there.

I just discovered some major problems with an older (not sure how old) template plan that wouldn't build to defaults. Something in the plan was stuck on building to a mono slab no matter what default setting I used. The included Profile plan in Chief 8 builds exactly as expected and I would advise anyone who is using an older template to update their's to avoid any future problems.