Doug_Park

The real power is item 2 in Joe's list. The other bits could be left out and they would still be very valuable.

In versions of Chief prior to X6 shadows would normally always be off in the preview mode. In X6 shadows are a lot faster so can be on all the time, if your card is fast enough. But for a slower card like the 540M you won't get fast enough performance to keep them on all the time.

The original intent was to have a quick way of switching the setup of defaults for certain annoation operations (disiplines as Joe calls them). That is all. Switching from drawing a floor plan to laying out electrical is one such example that could in some cases have take dozens of clicks to input up the correct settings. So not only was it tedious, it was easy to make a mistake. I regret adding the ability to change the layer set. That option is now theoretically not such a big deal now as the annotaiton set and layer set for a view are rememberd on a per view basis. Unfortunately, it seems like annoation sets are now being viewed as a solution to problems that they were never intended to handle.

From my point of view: Hardware lock: Easily broken, lost and a pain to support when the drivers don't work right. Driver issues have historically been a major problem to support. Hardware lock companies are quickly losing business so eventually it looks like they will not be an option. We charge extra for this option because it costs us a lot more to support and results in on average more customer down time so we like to discourage it. A catestrophic failure, such as broken or stolen lock is bad as it can take in the worst case at least several days to get a replacement lock. Software lock: Occasionally we see networking issues cause problems, but usually this is a problem that needs to be fixed anyway as it is probably interferring with the customers internet access. The software lock is the future and if trends continue will be our only option. It is currently the only option that we supply for Mac. We have far fewer support issues with the software lock. Normally a catestrophic hardware failure such as stolen laptop or massive disk failure won't prevent someone from getting back up and running even when we are closed. There are a lot of "fears" that can be brought up about either system. The need for a digital rights managment system is unfortunate but necessary in our market and either system would eventually in most theoretical distopian future scenarios prevent you from accessing the software.

The 540M is not a particularly fast card. I would reccomend turning off shadows when using that card as it will likley not keep up. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

Odd. My laptop with HD4600 graphics works just fine in X6, including shadows. Not quite as fast as the NVIDIA.

It appears that the main issue is how the ceiling is lighted. Colors look different in shadow. In order to get identical results you will need to have identical lighting on the walls and ceiling.

More than likely there is a driver issue. My first advice is to go to the laptop vendor and see if they have an updated driver. Often they do. The 4000 should work.

If you continue to have an issue with the plan please submit it to our support so we can track down the problem. I know that it isn't a normal issue, but if it is something we are doing wrong we would really like to have something that reproduces the problem so we can fix it.

Ray tracing is one of several computational problems that is very cpu intensive. Generally speaking the time to do a ray trace is based primarily on the multiplication of number of pixels by number of light sources. There are other factor as well but they are normally drawfed by that cost. To make a ray trace faster: 1) Get more and faster cores. 2) Reduce the number of lights. 3) Reduce the number of pixels in the resulting image. An SSD may help with the startup time, and certainly helps with many other operations in Chief. But that is a very minor improvement to ray tracing. Unfortunately at this time we don't take advantage of the processing power of the video card for ray tracing. But it would certainly help with other tasks. For the case you were looking at it doesn't look like more memory will help with your raytrace, but it might help with file caching or if you run across a really large model.

While we are on the topic of hidden features. One of the more powerful things for learn Chief is to take advantage of the contextual help. If you hover the mouse over a toolbutton, menu, edit handle, or if you are in a dialog. Hitting the help key (F1 on Windows), will take you directly to the help for that item. The documentation for Chief is actually way more complete that documentation for most programs these days. The help contains all the information that is in our manual and is possibly the least used feature in Chief. Almost every how to use Chief question that is posed and answered on this forum is learnable from the help system. Another underutilized feature is the support database, which has articles on most of the common things that our support team deals with. http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/database.html

Alternate input methods are fairly common. Hidden, but very useful. They are documented in the manual and help. Alternate input methods are available by using Right-Click, ALT-Click or by using the menu/toolbar mode switch. My favorites: 1) Right-Click to draw walls and lines. Right-Click drag, release, drag, click, drag, click... 2) Right-Click on end edit handle to curve a line or wall etc. 3) Right-Click drag to do a 2D array multiple copy. 4) Right-Click drag a corner edit handle on a polyline to maintain the angle. 5) Right-Click to move a wall without it extending attached walls.

With respect to my prior post. The line weight scaling can also come into play. The main thing is to make sure you are always using the same scale everywhere. As far as a view for showing things on screen as they would print. You have the following issues. 1) The real screen DPI and what the computer tells Chief is the screen DPI are almost always different. Historically on Windows the screen DPI has been normally assumed to be 96. However, diplays at close to 96 DPI frequently vary between something less than 96 to 120 or 130 DPI. New displays now run upwards of 300 DPI. I'm typing this on a Dell M3800 which Windows defaulted to a 200% scaling or 192 DPI, but the display is actually closer to 240 DPI. You can attempt to get the scaling more accurate in the control panel. 2) The DPI of your printer will almost certainly be different than your display DPI. This means that at times a line that looks reasonably heavy on screen could be nearly invisible when you print. 3) For performance reasons we don't use anti-aliasing to make the on screen display of lines look smoother. However, this is normally always done when we print. 4) Things just look different when you are looking at display which radiates light rather than looking at a printed sheet which reflects light. The type of display LCD, LED, CRT, projected, etc. will have an effect on how things look. Nothing beats looking at an actual printout to fully appreciate how things will look. Of course the paper used can also have an effect on how things look. While we could in theory provide a setting to zoom to print resolution, it is unlikely going to look the same on most displays as it will when you print. What I recommend is to create a line weight sample and then print it on a reasonably high resolution 8 1/2 x 11 printer and use that as a guide for choosing line weights. Typically CAD standards use line weights that vary between about 0.18 mm to 1.00 mm. Which in the out of box settings for Chief translate to 18 to 100 as the line weight. While you can go smaller, 18 seems like a reasonably small minimum. Chief treats a line weight of 0 as special in that it will draw as fine as possible on the device you printing to. In other words it will always be 1 pixel wide, not to be confused with a line weight of 1, which will be 0.01 mm wide or as near to that as possible when you print.

What version of Chief are you using?

So you are saying that in Drawing Sheet Setup the scale is 1/4" = 1ft in the first view with print preview on and in the second view you sent it to layout at 1/4" = 1ft and print preview is on and your layout sheet Drawing Sheet Setup is 1:1. 1) Assuming that the scale is correct in your plan view then you don't have print preview turned on in the first screen shot. 2) Assuming that you have print preview turned on in the first screen shot your drawing sheet scale is not 1/4" = 1ft. It is possibly set to 1/4ft = 1ft or something equally nonsensical in that direction. I can't think of any other causes. It should work and does work for me.

Select the Print Preview mode if you want to see things scaled and drawn like they will print. The printer will of course be at a higher DPI than your screen so anything that we do will be an approximation.

A hardware certification program would be very time consuming. Generally Chief runs well on just about reasonably modern computer, so it seems silly to create a short list of computers that work when there is an extremely long list of hardware that will work just fine. We want our software to run on the hardware that you already have if you are a new customer and work very hard to ensure that it will.

From the specs it appears you are on a very tight budget. I can't say for sure whether that hardware will work for you. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't run Chief, but it is a very low end machine so the performance will not match what most of us would demand as a minimum. The CPU is very low end. Look here for information on CPU speeds. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/index.php Look here for information on video card speeds. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ Generally, you probably want to be in the high-mid range groups for both CPU and Video for a computer that handles Chief well. If you drop below those levels Chief will still probably run, but won't be very fast. If you can I would recommend getting into the high-end range. The price difference between the fastest and cheapest in the high-end range allows for the creation of a very nice machine for under $1000.

Quadro cards are OK, but the price/performance is horrible. We have from time to time seen much slower fixes to driver issues on Quadro cards, although in recent times they seem to be keeping up better. I'm running a Quadro card on my current development laptop with zero problems.

The cable lights that we supply have the "Wall Mounted" attribute checked. So they pick a wall to hook to and align to it. 1) Copy the "Cable Lighting" symbol and paste it into your library. 2) Open it in your library and on the Options panel select floor mounted. (The height off floor is ignored) 3) The 3D origin needs to be modified. On the 3D Panel select Specify Origin and set the Y position to 60" this is half the total length. 4) Now set the Z value to 84 5/8" to get the same height result as the orignial or whatever works best for you. 5) Now you can place it wherever you want and rotate it to any orientation that you prefer.

Once we catch all the newbies, we will stop setting out the traps. Sorry, bad joke, I couldn't resist. Unfortunately, sometimes things that seem obvious when designing, writing and testing software turn out to be confusing to certain people. As we can we try to take feedback on those things and improve them. However, in some cases the improvments are sometimes viewed as a lower priority because with just a little bit of training the issues aren't so bad. Room heights, ceilings, and the whole interaction with multiple floors has proven to be very hard to make easy to understand. Partly because it is hard to visulize in 3D what everything does and partly because what Chief does is far more complex than even experienced users of the program usually understand so the simple solutions that have been proposed break down for various reasons. We have from time to time discussed creating a "story pole" interface for solving this, but so far the ideas that we and others have come up with don't appear to make the problem of communicating the complex interaction of multiple rooms on multiple floors all with various potential heights and platform levels above and below work out to an interface that is easy to understand. To some extent I think this is mainy related to not making platforms an editable entity, but there is probably more to it than that. It is certainly an area that we are interested in improving.

Depending on what layers you have displayed the 3D in different views may generate differently. This allows for a great deal of flexibility, but for a complex model it can take some time to regenerate. If you are pushing the memory usage of your computer into the range of needing virtual memory the performance of your fast machine can drop off and seem like an old 286 because of virtual memory thrashing. Regardless of how fast your computer, you can fairly easily push things to the point that things are very slow. Keeping the number of open 3D views to a minimum will help to reduce some of the demand. There are also many ways that your model can get so complex that it becomes a problem as well.

The obvious first thing to do if you have a crash on the Mac is to check to see if you have the latest update. We have fixed some crashes. Frequent crashes on the Mac are not something that we want to put up with. Please work with our support team to narrow down the cause. There are several reasons why there may be crashes on the Mac that don't occur on Windows, but no good reasons. We want to track these down and fix them, assuming they are ours. We have seen some issues with Video drivers on the Mac. Early in our Beta program Scott Hall had a poblem that we ended up needing to work around. Chief stresses hardware a lot more than your average software. This can cause a failure in the hardware to appear to be associated only with Chief. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that a crash is indicating a hardware failure. However, that is not my first assumption.

The ability to offset the CAD from the 3D is used more often than you might think. I can understand wanting to make it easier to line up, but I don't think we want to remove the ability to offset the CAD.

The most common reason that we run into where someone thinks that Save As has failed is that they saved to a different directory than what they thought and just can't seem to find the file. This is easily verified by using the recent file list in Chief to open the last file saved. If it isn't in the most recent file list then something is wrong. Not sure what.