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Perhaps time would be better invested in improving the contents and accessibility of the Help system, before developing an AI assistant to help navigate it, though. When something is not adequately explained in the Help, the solution should be to make sure that it is, rather than creating some kind of AI assisted system that looks elsewhere, amongst sources that may or may not be reliable.

This is constantly catching me out. Wherever I want to edit a field in dialogue boxes like this one: I press the little pencil icon to let me change the value, and get this far: What I often do is then click straight on the "OK" button at bottom right but this doesn't retain the value that I've just changed. To retain the changed value you have to type that value, then press return, then press the OK button. Is there a reason that pressing return is necessary? If this could be made to work such that typing the new value then pressing the OK button worked, it would save a lot of confusion! I know what I'm supposed to do but so often, the presence of that blue OK button waiting to be pressed leads me to do that, and then at some point I wonder why something's not working, and it's because what I thought I'd changed, I actually hadn't.

If an AI assistant could help someone like me (with very limited coding knowledge) write scripts or build marionette objects that would be very useful indeed.

Does it work if you assign the "2D treads" to a class which is set to show the desired surface hatch?

This would be rather useful for wall styles too, covering the common scenario where there is a basic wall core type that has different internal and external finishes in different places.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Beware that this may cause 2d components to disappear elsewhere in the drawing, where you don't want them to disappear.

@MMGD I don't know if things have changed in the past couple of years since I was looking at this last, but there are a few things to look out for as far as external monitors (specifically their resolution/size) are concerned, when you're dealing with MacOS. I found this article helpful the last time I was working out what monitor to get. https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

My strategy has been for a while to buy macs second hand. The price you pay can be significantly less than what you'd pay new, but macs tend to be pretty reliable and keep on going for quite a long time, so my perception is that paying the premium for new is not necessary. Don't dismiss the mac mini. Obviously it depends what you want to do in Vectorworks but unless you want to do a lot of rendering, a fairly modestly specced mac will be perfectly capable. I'm still running fine on one of the first generation M1 minis. 16GB of RAM. I work with 3 monitors. I do, sometimes, run into memory issues but only when dealing with unusually (for me) large files and doing certain operations. Day to day, navigating around quite complex models in shaded view works completely smoothly. I don't think I've ever noticed any significant fan noise coming from it (I have with earlier mac minis). For sure, when I next replace the computer I'll be aiming for quite a bit more RAM but at the moment the memory issues are more of an annoyance than a major issue. On the question of desktop vs laptop, isn't it the case that you pay quite a high premium for that portability, for similar specs? As I already have my monitors & keyboard etc and work in such a way that my setup isn't really portable anyway, I tend to stick to the desktop path. An option worth considering is the combination of a mini/studio with an ipad. I've been considering getting an ipad pro to let me be more portable, that could also function as an extra screen/drawing tablet while at my desk.

Yes, that's one of the things I wondered, whether a point cloud is actually the right thing for a topographic survey. There's quite a lot of "stuff" - trees, paths, steps, outbuildings etc so actually it's quite handy to have the point cloud because I can use it to check all sorts of little details but spot heights + positions of main features was all I asked for when I initially got quotes. The survey company seem to mainly do internal floorplans so I wonder if they actually don't quite know what they are doing with this kind of thing. It's quite a tricky site with a steep slope across it.

The surveyors who did my survey told me: This is the first time that this has happened with the cloud data, I’ve sent the files to Leica to ask for their help

Well, I don't think I'll be using these guys again.

Yup this basically.

Is there any limit on how many fields I can have in a single record format?

So - going back to the original survey I was provided with - the more I looked at it the more I could see there were quite big problems with it. I went back to the survey company and they fiddled with things and sent me a revised version of the point cloud. Actually we did that twice and it improved a bit each time but there were still various ghost images that were displaced by quite large distances. Eventually they accepted that it wasn't good enough, and went back to site to re-do it. The new survey is quite a bit better. There are still places I can see displaced ghost images. Not sure if you'd always expect a little bit of that, or should a properly done lidar survey be completely clean? Within the point cloud (imported into VW) there are areas where the points have colours that clearly aren't the colours of the objects scanned. Fore example blue points on an area of red tile-hanging and yellow and red spots within tree foliage. Does this indicate anything particular?