DBCooper

You can also look in the help manual for the section on using the union, intersection, and subtraction tools. These tools can be used with either 2D polylines or polyline solids and are super useful. There are also some training videos that might help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/305/subtracting-polylines-that-overlap.html https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/304/merging-polylines-that-overlap.html

Your soffit is oriented the wrong way. They will only slope front to back, not side to side. You need to pay attention to where the front arrow is pointing.

That looks like your drawing sheet. You can tell because it has the blue lines showing you the printable area and the shadows on the borders. You either turned on the drawing sheet or print preview. Both of these can be turned on using hot keys or by clicking on the toolbar buttons (that should be on the right side of your screen if you are using the default toolbars). You should be able to turn them off and the drawing sheet should go away. What I don't understand is how you can be seeing this when you open a plan. If I save and reopen a plan, then the program automatically turns them both off for me. The only time I know that it is on by default is for a layout page and it doesn't look like that is what you are doing because I would expect to see your layout borders. You might want to post your plan if you want someone to look into that more (or contact tech support). The other thing that I can tell by your picture is that your drawing sheet is not really setup correctly. If you tried to print directly from your plan view, you wouldn't get anything since it is not on the page. If you open up the "drawing sheet setup", you can adjust the paper size and/or the scale so that your drawing will fit on the page. You can then use the "center sheet" tool to put the drawing on the page. You can also click on the edge of the page to select it and just drag it around. This really only matters if you want to print directly from the plan view but setting it up right will help when you want to send views to layout pages. Here is a tech article about drawing sheet setup that might help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00725/defining-the-drawing-sheet-setup-for-printing.html

Ok, it looks like you can use one of these in a text box: %room.internal_area.to_sq_m.round(2)% %room.standard_area.to_sq_m.round(2)% and as long as the text box is in a room it should report the correct area in square meters. I was trying to use %room.area.internal.to_sq_m.round(2)% which does not work for some reason even though %room.area.internal% will give you the area in square feet.

If you started a plan in imperial units, then it will always be stored in imperial units and you can't easily convert it into metric units. You can modify your dimensions to display all lengths in metric units though. If you are displaying both metric and imperial, you should just be able to make the primary format metric and turn off the secondary units. If you need to show areas calculated in square meters instead of square feet, you might be able to use macros for doing this. For example, if you have a polyline with a label, you can use "%area% to display the area of the polyline in square feet and %area.to_sq_m.round(2)%" to display it in square meters rounded to 2 decimal places. I haven't figured out a way to make this work on room areas directly though so I usually end up make room polylines instead.

Did you turn on print preview or the drawing sheet either on purpose or accident? I can get a screen that looks a lot like you are showing when I turn print preview on and my house is not actually on the drawing sheet. If you zoom out and you can see the drawing sheet, then that is probably what you did. I think this is always reset when you close and reopen the plan though. You can adjust your background color in your preferences (under colors) but that would affect all plan views even after closing and reopening the program. You could have something behind the house with a solid grey fill style. The color could also be set to use your layer settings (which is maybe what NKBAChiefUser is suggesting?) If you can click in the background area and something is selected, then this would be worth looking into. If it's not one of those things, you might need to post the plan for someone to look at.

You could put everything in each room on different layers. Seems like a lot of work though. Might want to figure out if there is a better way to speed up your views. Since cad objects don't usually show up in camera views, I am guessing that you are using lots of symbols. If these were things that you imported, then maybe they have too many surfaces and you could then replace them with simpler ones. There are a lot of other things that can cause slow downs as well. This tech article has some things to look out for: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00521/troubleshooting-slowness-in-chief-architect-plans.html

There might be a way to use macros to get the text to show quadrant bearing (but I don't know how to do this). Maybe one of the macro gurus will chime in with an answer? You could just create a cad line and turn on "show angle" on the line style page. This angle will display using the cad default settings. If you don't want to see the line, you could then use the "invisible" line style. Also, just as an FYI, "number style" only affects what displays in the dialog boxes and does not affect anything in your plans.

In my opinion, it usually isn't worth it to buy a top-of-the-line computer system just based on the cost/performance ratios. You typically pay a very high premium for the latest and best hardware and within a few months it will no longer be the best. I will usually buy something that is one step down from the top and it usually serves me well while saving me some money. If money is no object, which I doubt this is the case otherwise you wouldn't still be working on an 8 year old system, then buy whatever you want. As an example, tight now it looks like you can get an RTX 5090 for about $3500 while you can get a 4060 for less than $1000. I doubt you will get enough of a performance boost to justify the extra cost. If you take a look at the blog article that Scott posted the link to, you will see the performance difference between the 4080 and 5080 is something like 2 seconds. You would have to do an awful lot of RTRT views to justify paying much more for that kind of difference and I'm not sure what kind of improvements it will make in other slow areas. Regarding the slow downs in your plans, chances are you could get some big improvements by making some small adjustments to how you work. Here is a tech article with some good general info that might help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00521/troubleshooting-slowness-in-chief-architect-plans.html

Welcome to the forum. So it usually works better to post pictures that were either exported directly from the program are that were done with a screen capture (print screen on windows machines) instead of using a camera to take a picture of the screen. Also, when people suggest you post a plan, they mean to attach a ".plan" file directly to the forum. Most plan files are too big though so you have to do things like make a ".zip" file instead. Sometimes you need to make a copy of the plan and remove things that don't have anything to do with the problem. And if none of that works, you can post it on the cloud somewhere and then include a link in your post. One gotcha that people run into is that you should not have the plan open in the program when you do try to do this because the file that gets attached might be empty. That said, I think Jason's post above might help you solve your problem. You might be able to select the wall in between the sun room and vaulted room and set the roof eave to something small. If that is not working for you, then I would try posting the plan so someone can poke around in it.

So Home Designer actually has a separate user forum you can find here: https://hometalk.chiefarchitect.com/ Since it is using the same engine that Chief is using, I think you need to turn off the crown molding in the room dialog rather than the wall dialog. Turning off room definition will just make your wall act like it is not a wall so that you won't get a room.

Well technically, George didn't ask about code. He only asked why his landings didn't pick up the stair settings. Mark gave him the right answer. Apparently, Chief doesn't like having landings stacked on top of each other. It only likes landings butted up to each other. See the picture below showing stacked landings vs. butted landings. It would be nice if stacked landings worked automatically but you probably need to send Chief a feature request if you want that to change.

If you have a wall in the library, all you need to do is to click on it and then draw it in your plan. It should automatically import the wall type.

It works for me. As long as the landing is connected to the stair, it should pick up the settings from the stair. Not sure why it doesn't work for you so you might want to post your plan.

Maybe the program thinks those railings make a "double wall"? Try setting the gate to "not through".