Doug_Park

I assume you have done basic hardware troubleshooting as follows: 1) Check hard disk for errors and fix as appropriate. 2) Check for malware. 3) Check your network for problems. 4) Download a fresh copy of Chief and install it. If the file was corrupt and you installed the same download on multiple systems that could be the cause. The file open dialog is different in X6 on Windows. It uses the more Modern file open dialog. There is a known problem in Windows where this dialog can be very slow under a number of circumstances including issues opening networked locations. This can appear to hang for awhile when opening the dialog, but should eventually become responsive. The hang opening the print dialog may be due to a somewhat obscure problem that was fixed in the latest update. The Quadro 2000 is actually a pretty slow card by today's standards. Look here for comparison of performance. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html Hangs sometimes are just the computer being very slow and may come back after some period of time. Normally these are very easy to reproduce with the right plan if they are indeed a problem with Chief. Unfortunately, if we can't reproduce it here that tends to point to your hardware as the problem. Multiple machines on the same network with similar problems could be the result of a network problem, malware, or some other application that interferes with Chief that is installed on all the machines. Hangs at random times could also be due to internet issues. We see this occasionally. In theory this can be eliminated as a cause by unplugging your internet and seeing if the problem persists. These are sometimes tough problems to track down because there can be multiple independent causes. If there is a problem with Chief then we want to track it down.

It is indicating that Chief thinks there is a bad wall connection somewhere. Look for a circle indicating the connection that Chief thinks is bad.

That is correct. The 780 barely fit into my box. The length was the tight bit.

If you have any X5 plan that is slower in X6 please let our support team know and get them the plan, steps to reproduce the slowness, and a measure of the difference you are seeing if possible. While we are aware of a couple of issues on Mac, 3D generation being one of them, we are probably not aware of all the possible scenarios so having things to look at will help us to identify and fix the issues. Our goal was to make X6 faster, in many cases we did, in some we didn't. We did make launching of Chief significantly faster, so I'm puzzled about the slow launch comment. It may be a slow internet connection, but other than that it should be fast. You could test that by temporarily disabling your networking. It is likely that X6 is using more memory so if you are running low on memory that could be a cause.

Look here: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html On paper the GTX780 is half the price and twice the performance of the K4000. The K4000 will probably perform OK and looks to be a significant step up, but you are paying a premium price for less than premium performance. I recently upgraded my old i7 desktop to a 780 and it works very well with Chief.

I would be fine making the timeout for the undo progress a little longer, but for something that takes longer than about 5-10 seconds people will quickly assume the program has hung. Having a progress dialog is reassuring in those situations and tends to make the time seem to pass quicker.

If you can find a way to reproduce the problem let our support team know.

I don't understand how anyone would want the wrong scale to be printed. I suppose if you never print a check plot or 1/2 or 1/4 scale output you wouldn't care, but if you always use %scale% you will always get the correct scale when printing. Even though it isn't changing in layout views it still does print correctly. While I can understand your confusion as to why it changes when you zoom, that should be reassuring that it will display an accurate scale regardless of what paper you choose to print on. But if you don't care, you don't care. For those that do, we have an option. The attached layout shows how easy it is to get the wrong scale. This was a 1/2 scale printout. The %box_scale% is wrong. %scale% is correct. If this doesn't bother you feel free to use %box_scale%. If it does bother you then use %scale%. Unfortunately, you can't use %scale% in the label as that will report the layout scale not the scale of the view. ScaledLayout.pdf

I think the main difference is that the progress dialog is coming up now when it wasn't in X5. The reason it wasn't coming up in X5 was to prevent crashes, although I think we did find an obscure crash due to having the progress dialog on Mac with Undo.

While on the topic of performance, and getting this thread back on track. One thing we did notice on Macs is that if you are driving a second monitor and it is using a different color profile than your primary monitor the drawing performance on the second monitor is slower for some video cards. Changing the second monitor to use the same color profile seems to speed things up.

Thanks for alerting us to this Tommy.

Out of curiosity what hardware are you running on? I have a MacBook Air from about two years ago that performs amazingly well for that hardware. It even drives a second large monitor without breaking a sweat. Zooming is smooth for small to medium sized models. There are certainly some things that we can improve with performance and we will work on those as they are identified. If you have a plan that is performing very poorly then we would really appreciate it if you would contact our support team with it so that we can look into why things are slow.

I'm not sure where the "later this month" information came from. While we are currently working on an Android version of this App it is still likely several months out. Later this year would be a more accurate estimate from what I understand.

The scale macro is supposed to always show the scale that we are drawing to. This is the true scale. The box scale is not the drawing scale so is a false scale unless you print to the sheet size you selected. You should prefer to use the scale macro if you want your printout to reflect an accurate scale. I'm not sure why the scale macro is not updating in layout as you zoom in and out. It does however update when you print so is still trustworthy from that standpoint. It is a bug that it doesn't update when you zoom in layout. It seems like it is only picking up the scale as it was when you did a send to layout. It does work in plan view. Sorry about the regression. My advice is to never use box scale because it won't be right for check plots or fit to paper.

Let us know how it works out.

Export to STL is available in X6. Printing a 3D model from the exported STL data is still tricky to get right from what I've heard, but can be done.

Please send the plan in to our support team. That is something that doesn't seem right.

You may want to try the "Select Next Tab", "Select Previous Tab" menu items.

Oh good. The timeout is working. Thank you for testing that.

One of our guys reproduced the crash. I think he has it nailed down. If I understand it correctly if you undo the deletion of the only layout box that refers to a plan that is not currently open in other views the crash may occur. BTW, thanks again for being diligent about sending in reports of issues. These reports are helping a lot to make Chief better.

For some creation modes we use a cross cursor + instead of an arrow or cabinet or ... When we are using the cross cursor we hide it when cross hairs are on and the aperture size is zero. The Arrow cursor is set in the control panel of the system on Windows. There is also a transparency setting for the overlay that draws feedback for selected objects, cross hairs and cursors. Cursors are drawn on this layer when the "Synchronize with Cursor" option is checked. If you uncheck this option then Cursors are drawn by the system and don't use the transparency setting. The transparency can also be controlled. 20% is the default we chose. You may want to try tweaking this up/down. Anything less than about 5% or greater than about 75% is probably no good, but that is a judgment call based on your personal preferences and the colors you choose for highlighting things.

The Arrow we use is supplied by the system so you can change it. Most of the other cursors are not. They are png files that are stored in the application folder.

Yeah, don't get me started on that. I encounter the you can't delete that file because some unnamed other application has it open on an almost daily basis. Often I know why, but occasionally it is like a where's waldo hunt to figure out. Every other OS does this right. That and the whole temporary files not getting deleted. If they are temporary they should go away, at the very least on a reboot. Every other operating system deletes them after at the very least a few days.

I find that some colors are better for cross hairs than others. Black is a decidedly a poor color for visibility for me. We default to a blue, but others have found that purple or other colors work better for them. Pick a color that contrasts well with the typical colors you use in you plan. Another option is to set the minimum pixel width in preferences, but that doesn't affect cross hairs. A sledge hammer approach is to drop the resolution of your display so that the pixels are bigger.

When composing the light for a ray trace, you may want to think about it from the standpoint of a photographer setting up a portrait. They carefully place lights so that the scene they are shooting looks they way they want. Ray tracing attempts to produce realistic lighting, but most of the time that is not what people are after.