Doug_Park

Everyone here is making really good points. The room structure dialog is a particularly difficult thing for many to understand. We can and should do better. Line drawing complaints are also valid. This is an area that I think deserves a lot more attention than we have given it in the past. In any case this is all really good feedback.

Understood. Definitely frustrating to deal with. If you do happen to come up with a repeatable case that would be great. In the meantime we will keep our eyes open for anything that we can spot that might be causing a problem like that. If it is common, someone is likely to come up with a reproducible case for us. Hopefully it isn't something that you see again. I would encourage you to do daily backups of your work. You may also want to set the automatic archive option in Chief to hourly. That way you would have multiple options to choose from to fall back to if something even worse happens to your plan. Crashes while the program is running could cause things like this. If you happen to find a way to reproduce a crash we would greatly appreciate getting the steps. In any case, I feel for you. It is never good when your tools fail you when you are under the pressure of a deadline.

It is hard to say what the cause is. If you can find some steps to reproduce the problem that would be ideal. I know that isn't a great answer. You could check your disk for errors using chkdsk to see if there is any corruption, but that is unlikely the cause as if you did have disk corruption you probably wouldn't have been able to open the plan. Although Chief has some fault tolerance built into the file that may have allowed it to open a corrupted plan.

I agree that the structure panel is confusing. I think this stems from the room centric way that Chief defines platform heights. Which is not the way many of us think about how a house is constructed. When I think of a house I think of the platform that supports a floor. Whether that be a slab or a framed platform. The design of Chief derives the platform from information about the heights of each room. Which allows for a lot of control, but requires thinking about things differently. This is complicated by the need to think 3 dimensionally about what is going on. Which is hard to do when the rules about how the dialog effect the model are not obvious. I know that we can do a lot better and we should.

I don't have any official word on a release date yet. Progress is being made. I have it installed on my Android phone at the moment. It seems to work pretty well and is getting better every day. Thanks for your inquiry. I'm confident that our talented marketing team will do everything in their power to make sure you know about it when it is available.

Thanks for the feedback on this. I had a conversation on this with one of our developers just the other day asking about what I thought might be the best way to fix this issue. I'm not sure what the status is, but it is certainly not working the way it should. I hope that we get this fix into the final release. Keep letting us know of problems that you have, we really appreciate every report on issues.

Hi Ben, In your case I think choosing a higher DPI will provide better results. I would choose the DPI that your printer uses, probably something like 600, 1200 etc. This will take a bit longer to print and take up more memory in the PDF. Let us know if you have more issues. This is a new feature so I wouldn't be surprised to find areas where things don't work quite as well as they should. Thanks for your detailed feedback.

Here is an article from HP on this topic. I hope it helps. http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03048374 Unfortunately 3D graphics and hardware have always been a weak link in computers. We work really hard to try to make them work right. In fact a couple of the guys were working really hard to try to find a solution to a problem with Intel graphics yesterday. It is our desire to make every graphics card work as well as we can. Thanks for the information on your system it helps us to better understand the problems that you and likely many others are having.

Sorry for your frustration. Terminology is hard in the building industry because it varies greatly, even within the US there is a lot of inconsistency. Throw in the potential confusion of differences in terminology in the UK and it gets a lot worse. We do provide personal training. Check this link out: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/training/personal-training.html Plus this forum has a lot of very helpful people that usually can answer your questions. We want you to be successful with the program. If you do have any specific comments about terminology differences and design differences that we should be aware of please let us know, either on our suggestions forum or you can also contact our support team. I have noticed that we have a lot more overseas customers using Chief these days which leads me to want to spend more time understanding your specific needs. Thanks for your feedback.

It is a little hard to say what is causing the wall to shoot through the roof. I would suggest contacting our support team making sure to get them a copy of the plan so they can dig through the problems. It is possible that there is a bug. It wouldn't be the first time we have had a problem with dormers. Your case is one that I have not personally tried to model so I don't have much advice. The orange bit is due to something that in 3D graphics is known as z-fighting. It occurs when two surfaces are coplanar or nearly coplanar. The first thing I would do to identify the cause is to take a cross section through the area and see what might be pushing up into the roof. Sorry you are having issues with this.

That is not a dll we install. My best guess is that you have some sort of disk corruption. Use chkdsk to scan and potentially fix errors on your drive. And you should probably also scan for malware just to be complete.

Agreed. Better control here seems like something that we should have given you a long time ago.

Wall alignment and other imprecise drawing can have a huge detrimental effect on how things work. This isn't limited to roofs either. The program makes decisions often on very small alignment differences that intuitively seem as if they could be more sloppy, but in the long run trying to make things work in the sloppy case ends up causing things to not work in other cases. We have over the years fixed a lot of bugs in Chief by tightening up the tolerances that are allowed for determining certain things. In any case if you have something that you think the program should be able to handle we would like to have an example of the problem so that we can try to improve how things work. We really appreciate it when we get this feedback.

We really appreciate everyone who are running the beta version. Your help makes the program a lot better. As always please report all crashes or other things that don't work correctly to our support team. The sooner we find out about these issues the quicker we can get them fixed.

Good points. At some point it probably makes sense to create some sort of compatibility mode for editing that mimics the more common methods established by CAD vendors prior to the advent of affordable personal computers. Although, for some coming from a non CAD world our input methods are likely to be more intuitive as they tend to follow techniques pioneered by Apple and other late comers to the interactive input of lines into a computer. I think having options here is the best solution, especially given our very large, and generally somewhat satisfied, customer base that is used to our input methods. When I redid the editing engine for X1, I considered the ramifications of doing this. At the time it seemed like the design of our editing engine was amenable to supporting other editing techniques, although it would require a great deal of testing and tweaking to make sure that nothing is lost. As we get more and more people using Chief that are coming from the OtherCAD world having a compatibility mode is becoming more important to ease the transition. At the same time we don't want to force this on anyone who is used to and likes our current editing methods.

So if I understand it correctly there are two points of confusion here. First, you don't use degrees, minutes and seconds. Which I agree is a really odd way of displaying angles which doesn't make much logical sense to me, but is very common. The second confusion on our end is your use of comma for the decimal place indicator which produces something that can be confusing to someone not expecting the use of comma as a decimal separator. We would write 12.90° rather than 12,90°. In your case the answers are not as good as they should be. You can open the angular dimension and select the Degrees format for display. Unfortunately, setting this as the default for new angular dimensions is not an available option. I don't think we have a setting for controlling the number of decimal places. This really shows off our lack of complete support for international locales, which is really unfortunate. Are you able to get the comma display correct. I think we pick that up correctly from system settings, but I'm not in front of my Mac at the moment to check. I really appreciate your feedback. Unfortunately, most of our metric feedback has been based on customers in Australia, where they seem to be OK with the degrees minutes seconds format. I look forward to finding and fixing other issues that you may have due to our less than complete understanding of the world.

Thanks for you feedback Johnny. I do agree that how we draw lines is different than what is traditionally done in CAD programs. I think that there is value in adding a tool that draws lines that won't connect with each other. We continue to attempt to make Chief work better so any holes in the program that you see are things that we want to hear about. Again thank you for your feedback. It is the interaction with and response to our customers to improve the program that has made Chief as good as it is and will continue to make it better in versions to come.

Any cases that don't generate correctly should be sent in to our support team so that we can look into correcting the issues. It is hard to test for every possible configuration so we may miss some combinations of things that don't work. Thanks for using the program, we look forward to making it better with your help.

First question. Are you running the 64 bit version of Chief? If not you should. It will allow you to access all the memory on your computer. Beyond that there a number of things that could be chewing up memory. It kind of depends on what you are doing though so if you were able to post your plan we could probably figure out where that is. Typically memory usage is high with the following things. 1) CAD details that are generated from the 3D model. These can be surprisingly large. 2) Importing of very high resolution images. These tend to chew up a lot more memory that most people realize. 3) Curved stuff. Moldings and other things on curved walls or round top windows tend to add up because in order to get a smooth look a lot of small surfaces need to be generated. 4) Lots of high resolution imported symbols. These can add up and in some cases can create significant memory usage. Beyond that the suggestion of subdividing the model is a really good strategy. The images of the model you show doesn't look horribly complex so I suspect there is something that is not so obvious going on in terms of memory usage. If you can, post the plan and we should be able to figure out what is going on. It is a very cool sounding project.

First, I can assure you that no engineer here is laughing when you hit one of the land mines or speed bumps in Chief that confuse you. Quite the opposite is true. In some cases your confusion keeps our engineers up at night worrying about how to make things better. The best thing to do when you hit one of these issues is to let us know. Suggestions is a good place to do this on this forum. But if you are talking to anyone here on the phone or in person you are encouraged to mention these things as well. You can always drop our support team an email as well. An example: For a long time we had a common question on our forum. "Why are my lines not connecting?" This was generally because the program was in the Edit Object Parts mode. What we did was add an icon that floats along next to your cursor that matched the Edit Object Parts icon. The nearly eliminated the questions about this and a few other cases that were common states that you could get into that had behavior that you normally don't want. When we can we like to fix these issues. The best way to keep these annoyances visible is to continue to comment about them. Thanks for the good suggestions on how to improve Chief.

I noticed that on my laptop the lines were much more distinct when I wasn't running on battery power. The screen was brighter. There may be an Intel graphics correlation here, but I'm not seeing it on my laptop. But then it has fairly modern Intel graphics. Only about 1 year old. I'm starting lean in the direction that what I'm seeing is not the same as what you are seeing.

The question is a good one to ask. Because it boils down to how can we make the software easier to use. Typically the answers are: 1) Change the software to be more intuitive. 2) Make the training materials easier to understand and access. Making things more intuitive is a bit hard because what is intuitive for one person is not for another. For example a round stop sign is unintuitive for a person in the US but they do exist in some locales. It gets harder when you start talking about how people think about things. What makes sense to me often won't make sense to everyone. And in fact it is often the case that there is no solution that makes sense to everyone. At some point we have to pick a way of doing things, preferably the way that the largest number of people find intuitive. Documenting things well is always a good thing to do. But you can't force people to understand the documentation or for that matter to read it or watch it. But we can always try to improve it. However, eventually this becomes hard to comprehend because it tends to grow without bound and there isn't a good indexing scheme. At one point we talked about coming up with an intelligent agent of sorts that would hook into all the various sources of information about a particular tool in Chief and present it as web page that you could then dig through. The idea is to mine our documentation, training videos, Chief Talk, knowledge base articles, you tube videos etc. With the addition of a vote this up or down helpfulness rating this could potentially provide context specific help that is both helpful and current. Of course that is kind of a pie in they sky thing. I'm not completely confident that it could work well. Back to this forum, what we have here is a cooperative group of very helpful individuals that collectively comprise a sort of Chief Architect Oracle.

Alan, Did you send this in? I don't see it in our database yet, but I don't want to add a duplicate if you already sent a report in on it. This is very weird. Open plan. Move anything and I get about a 3 second delay. Switch to all on set. Switch back to floor plan set. Move anything and it is fast less than 1 second. I then saved a copy of the plan, closed it and reopened it and it remains fast.

Joey, I'm curious as to what is really going on. Is the problem on your laptop the issue I'm seeing that is the result of very high DPI or is it another problem? On my laptop the screen is nearly 300 DPI so the very fine black lines against a really dark background become invisible. I see the same thing regardless of whether I'm running the NVIDIA or Intel graphics on this machine. It seems like increasing the pattern line weight or changing the line color to something more contrasting helps.

If you toggle color off do they show up?