AvoyeDesign

1 minute ago, HumbleChief said:

Rod,

 

That's gotta help - I hope. I know they are aware of the problem but the fact an issue like this isn't addressed as soon as it's known is concerning and the response you got from tech support basically saying the behavior is intended, with no real plan to correct it, is even more concerning. I can deal with it because I know about it but was caught out the other day because the behavior is so unexpected I forgot Chief worked in this way.

Exactly.  And I don't see how the correct function of a feature should require one to save their work, close Cheif and open it again.  And without any persistant notification, this is a very serious oversight that could cost money or even cause harm.  Could you imagine if an engineer was using chief, and imported engineering data/specifications from a PDF?  What if he was updating for changes to the plan, where spans were increased, and assumed his new calculations were reflected in the data brought over when he updated the PDF?  Chief needs to put out a hotfix ASAP to produce a warning, and get this on the top of priorities for a permanent fix.

When I get back to the office I will follow up on the support ticket and link this thread.

Yup, this behavior is ripe for an errors and omissions suit.  While I do expect some dilligence from myself to update the pdf by deleting and importing the updated file, that Chief doesn't actually refresh the updated file and DOESN'T MAKE THIS CLEARLY KNOWN is a huge problem.

Even a bigger problem than calling me Kevin.

Hi Black Diamond, I would suggest a couple of things for duplex/multiplex buildings:

For party/demising walls that are a double 2x4 wall, use a single Chief wall with 2 stud walls in the main layer and an air gap between, so chief doesn't create a room between them.  For furred walls against a foundation, either incorporate the entire furred wall into the foundation wall (this might not work right as the studs shouldn't go to the footing) or better yet use the "furred wall" setting in the structure tab of the furred wall DBX.  Also make sure that the 1/2" air gap is a layer of the furred wall and bring it tight to the foundation wall with bumping/pushing on.  Using the "furred wall" setting, chief should ignore the furred wall as a room defining wall and the slab height controlled by the main basement area will extend to the concrete wall.

I reported this to Chief tech support a while back and this was their response:

Hi Kevin,

I understand you are trying to have Chief Architect Premier X10 check for an updated PDF when opening a plan. Please let me know if that’s incorrect.

Chief Architect will work from a “cached” copy of the plan for performance reasons. I was able to reproduce the issue as you described it.

However, if you’re updating the PDF separately you will need to close out of the Chief Architect software completely and then open it again. It will then pull from the PDF file and not from a cached copy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Cameron
Chief Architect Technical Support

4 minutes ago, HumbleChief said:

Rod, Tried it a couple ways but don't like anything about decks. Sometimes Chief remembers that it was a deck when the room is re-named and I think the cantilever underside is a great idea but why isn't it on its own layer that you can turn off/on?

 

Oh yeah though about the inv. walls and room below too but like you say a bit of a PIA.

Out of curiousity I used the layer eyedropper on that surface and painted another object, and it was placed on the floor surfaces layer.  I remember when this was added, back in the X3-X4 days.  To me it seemed like a poorly implemented band-aid solution to a problem.  It should really be a controllable assembly like floor and ceiling finish layers for a room, that is only available if part of the room has no room below.

I rarely use balconies, but when I do I don't bother with it.  I don't do a lot of renderings where showing texture there might be important, so I don't recall ever having to deal with materials and thicknesses and z fighting problems.  I don't recall them much in cross sections either, and if needed I would just cad patch over it, and call out a detail to at 1 1/2" scale to get into the specifics.

Still annoying that this area has been overlooked for so long.

On 7/17/2018 at 9:07 AM, JoeinNorCal said:

Thanks all!  It's fixed.  Not correctly, but it works for me.  ALL my deck railings happen to be "interior railings."  That one just didn't have the correct exterior material.

 

But the little technical challenges have sometimes driven me insane.

I would suggest as good practice that you draw exterior decks with the exterior railing tool and interior decks with the interior railing tool.  Chief sees both of these as different funcitons, and in the past I have seen problems arise similar to this.  One example was someone used the exterior railing tool for interior railings and was not getting the right finish around the floor edge, even with the correct wall type.  Chief was constantly trying to make that interior room a deck, and there was some buggy code that may have been reslolved since.  But best be safe and use the tools as they are described.

I'm a 10 year user and I still go insane with some of Chief's erratic problems, you are not alone.

I am assuming that this exterior room is specified as a balcony and not a deck?  If so, then I think you are stuck with that.  You could draw an invisible room on the floor below and specify ceiling layers, but that could be a pain.

12 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 

Not saying that there is no improvement, but as in your case I think if you need to knock down the lag by a second or so then this should help to do the trick. If you mathematically access things from a read/write perspective you can conclude that type or improvement. At best, a standard SATA might read/write at about 150 MB/sec, a decent SSD will get you about 300 MB/sec, the best NVME might reach 600 MB/sec and a ram disk would likely do this in a millisecond. However, in all cases a 200 MB CA plan file should read in less than 1.5 seconds. Just suggesting that if one such as the OP stated is experiencing a 30 sec lag when turning off a display layer then there must be something else going on.

You are probably right that there is something else going on.  But the Ramdisk seems to take a huge chunk out of the problem right off the bat.  For a write time of 1.5 seconds for a 200mb file, that adds up to a lot of time over the course of a day, and even that 600 MB/sec NVME drive is a bottleneck compared to the ramdisk (0.33 seconds vs. 0.001 seconds.)  That Ramdisk takes less than 1% of the time the NVME drive takes.  That is a MASSIVE time gain over a full day's work.  Now that being said there are other processes than just the writing of the undo file, and by no means do I find the Ramdisk solution to reduce times to a millisecond.  There is still a very slight delay, less than a second though, down from 2-3 seconds.  But it is below the threshold of intolerable, which is probably just short of 1 second.

I should also note that my files don't even come close to 200mb; my largest ever is 24mb, and I sitll get slowdowns up to 3 seconds per operation.  Closing all 3D views improves it much, but the Ramdisk is smoothest and allows me to have 3D views open when I work.

2 hours ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

My conclusion is that the slowness being encountered seems to be more complex than just read/write times. My sense is that there are significant CPU operations involved in preparing the data for writing and putting the model back together after a read.

Reead and write times seem to be very critical for me, as simply changing my temp folder location to the ramdisk has sped up almost all edits and operarions form 2-3 seconds to near instant.  You are probably more qualified than I to speak to other bottlenecks and speculate about other ways to optimize this, but it seems that for the average user with enough ram, a ramdisk is a simple solution.

13 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

 

You would have to create the Folder every time you booted the computer , before starting CA , as the RAM Disk is Created at Boot Time and is not persistent.

 

For the last 5 years I have had a CA_Temp Folder and a CA_Undo Folder in the Root of C Drive for CA to Use as C is my NVME SSD which is pretty quick but not instantaneous and that has allowed me to use Undo, something which is useful to me , in case I get down a "rabbit hole" trying to fix something....

 

There maybe other RAMDisks available which work differently , I have not had time to look into it further...

 

M.

 

 

Both the ImDisk and the Radeon Ramdisk that I've tried have a feature that saves the drive as a disk image on shutdown and loads it again on startup.  This is almost instant for all purposes, and saves you the time to set up the folders each time.  Just as long as you don't open Chief while the drive is unmounted; if you do, Chief wil reset the temp folders to default.

I wish I had found out about NVME drives when I researched the system that I built.  I would have gone with a 960gb Pro Samsung M.2 instead of the EVO 500gb.  I still could upgrade if I wanted, but after all the cash I spent on this system I think I'm good for now.

6 hours ago, Smn842 said:

• The large undo files are stored even when clicking OK to a dialog with no changes.

This needs to be adressed, IMO.  If Chief can recognize that nothing has changed, there should be no need to record an undo state.  I noticed this behaviour many years ago.

Quote

• Use an internal memory cache with a user configurable size (so in effect an internal RAM disk) and when push the oldest undo files to disk. 

I was thinking the same thing earlier, and I would really love this.  I don't see it as being super difficult to implement, as long as it is an option so that users with limited system resources could choose between caching undo states to disk or ram, and like you said, specify the maimum amount of ram that Chief could use for this.

5 hours ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

You will also need to be careful sizing a ram disk as this will reduce the available ram for other operations, could force your system to resort to a swap file(superfetch) which will potentially slow down other operations.

I upgraded my system from 16gb to 32gb of ram just for this purpose.  I'm currently running a 3gb ram disk, which I've determined is enough for the file sizes I work with, but I could go up to 16gb and still have half of my ram dedicated for general use by the system.  I've monitered my ram usage without a ramdrive running, and I don't think I've ever used more than 10gb.

Also, forgive my ignorance of how software runs, but it seems to me that chief is simply making us wait for it to write each undo state before we can continue working.  Whether it's 3 seconds for me, or 30 seconds for the OP's client, Chief seems to be saying "hold on, don't do anything until I write an exact copy of what you have here to disk in case you change your mind."  And I've observed, much as the OP did, that the CPU runs virtually idle while Chief does this.  Can Chief's processes not be designed to run undo save operations in the background while the user works uninterrupted?  If the speed of writing to disk is slowing us down, why does the program make us wait for that?  This doesn't make sense to me.  Now, for a plan that requires 30 seconds to save an undo state, that could create quite a backlog, I would admit.  I don't work with plan files nearly that large:  My largest files are for a 4 plex and a very large custom home, and each were no more than 24mb each.  Even at that file size, small in comparison to the OP's, Chief did seem to move like frozen molasses out of a glass ketchup bottle.

On 4/25/2018 at 8:58 AM, Kbird1 said:

FYI ...another followup on using IMDisk  , ( see post above too) for me a 2nd issue has arisen , IMdisk was stopping Windows Update from Working , I suspect something do do with the Windows Temp File/Folder , but once the Ram Disk was unmounted and IMDisk uninstalled the Win10 Updates installed as normal again.

 

seems to be an issue for others as well

https://sourceforge.net/p/imdisk-toolkit/tickets/9/

 

 

 

 

Hmm, I may be on to something here.  It looks like ImDisc instructs the system to use its Temp folder.

On 4/25/2018 at 8:58 AM, Kbird1 said:

FYI ...another followup on using IMDisk  , ( see post above too) for me a 2nd issue has arisen , IMdisk was stopping Windows Update from Working , I suspect something do do with the Windows Temp File/Folder , but once the Ram Disk was unmounted and IMDisk uninstalled the Win10 Updates installed as normal again.

 

seems to be an issue for others as well

https://sourceforge.net/p/imdisk-toolkit/tickets/9/

 

 

 

 

I wonder if you decline the option in ImDisk to create a Temp folder, and manually create a Temp folder on the ramdisc just for Chief, would Win 10 updates work fine?  I'm guessing that the temp folder option in ImDisc somehow tells Windows to use that location instead?  I'm only shooting in the dark here, as I'm not super savvy on these sorts of things.

I just did a quick test over a minute of my most efficient work, with the ramdisc running, and I performed 14 draw/edit operations.  If I had chief running without a ramdisc, it would have taken me at least another 30 seconds to perform all those tasks.  That is a 33% time saving, over the course of an entire day that could be huge!  I definitely reccomend this to anyone who wants to speed up their workflow.

I had installed Radeon RAMDisk a few months back and tried this, and it didn't make any noticable difference, so I completely discounted using RAM disc.  On a whim I just tried ImDisk as you did, and got an improvement from 3 seconds to place a cabinet to almost instantaneous.  Those 3 seconds add up.  If I'm making 10 edits per minute, that is half a minute of waiting for chief to respond.  And while I don't see myself working at a rate of 10 edits per minute on a regular basis, I would guess that this could easily account for a 20% speed improvement in my work (not to mention reduced frustration).  Time is money...

And the interesting part:  that 3 second time loss was only apparent when I had a 3D view open.  Without the view open it was almost as fast as with the ramdisc.  Something is really odd about that, and I checked it with auto rebuild walls/floors/roofs disabled and it didn't matter.  Chief really needs to optimize this better.  Between this and a huge backlog of cad blocks, this program becomes a turtle in no time.

I'd like to see this in the suggestions forum, for a better and more efficient undo process.  

Following.

I did the math the other day, and the pixel density on a 55" 4K TV would be higher than on my 32" 1080p monitor.  I see no reason that using said TV with a 4K capable video card would not produce sharp text and clean, clear lines.  That being said, probably best to bring your system to the dealer and demo the TV before you buy.

I am a Chief Architect user of ~10 years.  I was involved in the beta test program for X3 and X4, and one or two other realeases, and I consider myself an advanced user of Chief Architect.  As a designer for the last 10 years, I have also created and developed many tools to assist with workflow, time tracking, project management, quality assurance and project metrics.

I am interested in offering my services to Chief Architect users as a trainer and consultant to help you improve your skills with Chief, your workflow and productivity.  I am looking for clients who are frustrated with their level of understanding of the software and want to learn more effective ways of setting up and using Chief, and clients who want advice and direction on workflow and productivity in general.

If you are interested in my help, please feel free to contact me through my email below or by PM on this forum.

Hi Chief Modify,

I've had a quick look at your plan and have noticed a lot of areas that require attention, that I think come down to sloppiness with the program.  I don't intend to come across as critical, it looks like you are new to chief and I think you've done a very good job with what you have so far.  But I would suggest that you start by making sure that your plans are as tight and accurate as possible.  Make sure that 2nd floor walls align above 1st floor walls.  Check that roof edges are straight and meet the outside surface of a wall they but into, and don't cut through the wall or stand off of it.  Chief does a lot of things really well, but it also relies on the user being accurate and precise.

I do notice that the roof surface of the lower roof is below the floor surface of the second floor where it passes over the exterior wall.  This may be causing the 2nd floor wall at the open below area to project above the roof.  You can also use the "shelf ceiling" option for that 1st floor closet room to remove some of those attic walls.

It is hard to tell from just a picture.  If you post the plan someone can have a look for you.

I haven't done 50 years of framing, but of the framing I have done, we bolted the sill plates to the foundation so that we can frame the floor on top of them.  OK, so the sill plate is wood, which makes it framing.  But we also infill frame between step down foundation walls and the floor.  Is that framing part of the floor?  I think chief handles the sill plate better when it is an attribute of the foundation wall.  When you consider that the finish ceiling is usually above the sill plate, attached to the underside of the joists, it makes sense to me that chief handles it as part of the wall.

I have a spreadsheet for this, I've attached it here so you can get an idea how I work.  It is a tedious process, but it is the best I can do.

The spreadsheet I attached is a master sheet.  Every time I do my assemblies for a project, I check to see that I have in this file assemblies that are the same or close enough to modify.  If I need to create new ones, I do this and save it in the master sheet, so they are available next time I need them.  Then I make a "Save as" copy of the sheet into my project folder and delete all the assemblies I don't need.  I make changes and adjustments to the ones I need, then copy them into rich text objects in Chief.

I started doing it this way in X4, and it worked great.  Chief would preserve the row and column widths and I could stack components of my schedules in a predictable way to make nice clean schedules.  I put a lot of work into making this system clean and organized.  Unfortunatly, in X9 chief started compressing schedules so that there was no empty spaces, which means that if an entire row or column is empty it is compressed to a thin line, and even populated rows and columns were compressed to the largest body of text in a given cell.

I end up doing all my schedules in X4 as I did before, and printing a layout to PDF.  Then I import that PDF into the X10 layout.  It takes time, but works for me.  I've reported the spreadsheet compression issue to tech support, and they have passed it along to the development team.  But if they actually add spreadsheets to Chief, I'll forgive them for this.  If they make a tool to let us schedule out floor, wall and roof assemblies like this with user defined attributes I'd be over the moon.

Assembly Worksheet.xls

McNight Assemblies X4.layout

McNight Assemblies X4.plan

On 3/3/2016 at 4:59 PM, GerryT said:

 

 

On Mac systems, these fonts are embedded with the Chief Architect installation but not installed on the system. As such, they are available for use in Chief Architect but not in other programs.

 

 

 

 

 

You can copy the font from a PC and install them on a MAC using Font Book.

 

 

 

 

 

Not sure if this violates any copyrights -- Check Tech Support.

 

I remember a while back some discussion around this font being a proprietary font that is subject to the licensing agreement that comes with Chief.  This came up because users here were circulating the font to other users who did not have the newer version of Cheif that it was first packaged with.  I could be wrong on this, but if not, they probably have a good reason to lock that font to Chief only for Mac users, perhaps something they can't do on PC.  

I have had this problem as well.  It is annoying, but it actually taught me the value of unblocking all text blocks when placed in the plan.  To many blocks in the plan weighs it down significantly.  I would prefer though if we could add text to library without blocking it.