dshall

Yes,you have option to draw ref floor first or last, choose first, now make sure all of your rooms have a fill and turn on the ROOM LAYER in layer set. I use this all of the time. What happens is anything on lower floor will be hidden buy the room above that has a fill yet other things on lower floor will show because there is not a room above. You are on the right track.

you bet, send me your email.... and name to dscotthall@mac.com

Now that you are being more specific....... I do not believe the materials list has been improved.... they did spend time on the stairs, but I do not think there has been a super increase in the usability of the stairs and I say that from personal experience and from the input from others. I will say that some folks think there has been an improvement in the stairs..... but I do to think it will help me. I have already noted the improvements that matter to me and those are the macros that Joe Carrick and Michael the Alaskan have created.

You win Larry. I thought hitting only 4 keys was pretty quick, takes about .003 seconds, if CA can come up with a faster way, that is great.

If you did not like the last release, I think the latest release is even less exciting.... so don't waste your money if you are not a full time user.

There is no extra step, 4 key strokes for me and I am done. It works for me as is. It cannot get much quicker.

This is the way to go. I have set up hot keys to carry out these operations. 4 key strokes and I am done (less than Joe's 6 keystrokes...... I have practiced with keystrokes longer than Joe).... easy peasy.

X9 MACRO GOTOMEEETING LINEUP DIPSH**HALL, Jon Scussel (Spelling corrected), NYGreg, Perry (because he always shows up), Ray Rood the "Fireman", OKC, MARK MCA, JOE CARRICK, ROBERT EVANCE, "ALAN HIP WADERS LEHMAN" (you guys figure out what "hip waders mean") , DAVID SKOGG, CHOPSAW, LARRY "HOT KEY" HAWES, MOE G., SCOTT MENARD, BRIAN NEWKIRK , CHARLES VOLZ, MATT KENNEDY, ALAN BUTLER, JPC (i always love to hear what JPC has to offer), ZOWIE (I BET HE IS GREEK OR FROM THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA), CHRIS ROOD, LANCE VOORHEIS, CAPITAL DESIGNS, ..................... 24 TO DATE 25 MAX OKAY, there is some interest, I will keep a running log of those interested, the GTM will probably happen within 3 weeks, I need to get a commitment from The Alaskan Son and Joe Carrick so they can share how their macros work. This GTM will be a time saver and will definitely be worth your time. First 25 are guaranteed a seat. Now that we are in public X9 BETA, we can talk about X9 publicly. I have been working with X9 for several months now. It's interesting that I have forgotten what the new features are except for 2 features. Please, let me know what YOUR best new features are. But for me, the best new features were provided by outside MACRO WRITERS, Joe Carrick and Michael that Alaskan Guy. CA should get some credit because there was something they did under the hood that enabled Joe and Michael to write the macros. I am not sure if they added Hollybrock dual carbs or bored out cylinders or turbo injectors, but whatever it was, it is appreciated. Joe came up with a way to provide auto header labels. Not a perfect solution, but helpful until CA figures out how to do it. Michael came up with a way to auto tabulate areas. We know that CA will give you the living area.... personally I have never used it because I do not trust it and I do not trust my modeling skills to get accurate areas, so it is essentially useless info. What Michael did was to come up with macros that can auto tabulate FAR's, COVERAGES, NEW FLOOR AREAS, EXISTING FLOOR AREAS, IMPERVIOUS AREAS, REQUIRED ATTIC VENTILATION, REQUIRED CRAWL SPACE VENTILATION etc. It is not super auto, but with a little help from me, I get the info. Just yesterday I was meeting with a client,we were maxing out the FAR, in seconds I was able to get the right size footprint shape...... all done in front of client. Can you imagine how much time this saved me AND HOW MUCH TIME IT SAVED MY CLIENT. Do you think he is a client for life? Michael's macro is my highlight of X9. Anyway, if there is enough interest in this, I would be willing to host a GTM with interested parties to discuss their macros and to maybe "tweak" the macros. Joe and Michael do charge for the macros, however the price is very reasonable, less than $25.00 (I think). Pays for itself on the first job. NOTE FROM JOE: "I would be happy to contribute to this meeting. We just need to coordinate the date and time. I golf on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings - not negotiable Michael and I have similar (but different) approaches to Area Analysis and Door/window Labels. I also have some other macros that I can demo during the GTM. The final release of X9 will be mid February and I've been told there will be some additional capabilities in that release. It might be better to have the GTM a week or 2 after that."

Great OKC...... you are awesome......... hey, guess who is going to come by to see me this Friday? Yep, Steve Nestor....... so Steve emails me the other day and says he is going to come out and visit his son who is at UCSD..... and he suggests we have lunch together....... I say let's do it........ I always enjoy visiting with folks from the CA website....... I keep asking P. to come out and visit, it has not happened yet.

Are you guys looking for something for free? If not, pay it and move on. It's a dollar a day....

It's so funny, we all make mistakes, I made a mistake getting up this morning, give them a call and they will fix it, they are really good about that.

Yea, I guess you need to be current with SSA..... sounds like you will have to wait until the end of the month which is when you will be current.

Just call CA and they will probably hook you up in less time than it took me to type this. Go to the source if you want a quick resolution.

Are you kidding me..... I lasted 1.25 minutes, and then I had to turn off this 6 minute video. That guy can drag out a vid longer than I can......

Sorry for this misquote. Bottom line, I cannot control the direction of fj and cj independently...... something that has been an issue for me for 6+ years. I assume it is my problem.

I got the PM, you think it is broken. I sent in a bug report.

Hey Michael, very good vid, I think there were some tips you pointed out that were good...... but..... I tried to replicate on my MAC....... I think the MAC works differently. I will post a vid in a second..... skip the first 2.36 hours and go to the last 1.5 minutes.... you will see that I eliminate all framing, I have 1 joist direction in plan and I build ONLY THE CEILING FRAMING, yet the ceiling framing does not obey the arrow. It might be a MAC thing. I must go to an appointment now. If you follow my utube vids, the vid might pop up in about 5 minutes.... remember, the last minute is all you need to see to understand this might be a MAC issue. BTW, you framing was there when I opened plan.... I may of deleted it at some point.

I wonder what I did wrong. Can you do a real real real quick vid showing how you changed CEILING JOIST DIRECTION. Thanks

Michael, if you wouldn't mind doing a quick vid showing how you would open your attached plan and change the direction of the ceiling joists. I could not open your plan and rotate the ceiling joists 37 degrees. How would you do it?

Michael always seems to prove me wrong, so I anticipate he is going to rip me up for this post. I was not able to control the CJ & FJ separately, I saw Glenn do it, I saw the results from Michael, but I was not able to do it. I reposted Michael's plan, with my changes, but I was not able to change the ceiling joist direction. 1- michael built his dropped ceiling wrong, but it should not of effected the framing 2- I was not able to get my ceiling framing going in a different direction like Glenn 3- I saw Glenn do it, and it worked for him, but I was not able to achieve his results following his instructions..... I must of missed something 4- Glenn did his framing in 2 stages, floor joists first and then ceiling joists (or vice versa), I like to have auto framing on all the time because things change, so I would prefer to have a joist direction arrow for the floor joists and one for the ceiling joists, I am sure I requested this years ago, Multi-directional framing by dsh.plan vid below

Ditto. Maybe we are doing something wrong. It does not work for me at all too.

Nice job guys, thanks. I thought I had played with this years ago and it didn't work too well.

Michael, if this was so, it is good news. I think what you are implying is that you can specify the floor joist direction independent of ceiling joist direction. If that is what you are saying, can you show a pic of the ceiling joist framed in northwest direction and the floor joist in northeast direction. IOW, the CJ are perpendicular to FJ, and they are at 45 degree angle to the walls. if you are able to do that, did you use two joist direction arrows and how did you define one arrow as controlling CJ direction and how did you define the other arrow as defining direction of FJ direction.

Well, I am not sure if that is what I am doing or what Perry is doing or what Jerry is doing or what Jon is doing. I think we are all adding the framing to the ceiling finish and not to the ceiling structure and not to the floor assembly. I do not think anybody is creating a floor above the room.... there is already a floor at the second floor.

actually to be clearer, you might want to change the ceiling finish, I am not sure if you can change the ceiling surface.