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Rick Berge

Vectorworks, Inc Employee
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Posts posted by Rick Berge

  1. There's two things that accumulate in the Project File. The more of it there is, the bigger the file gets, and the slower it is to copy the data back and forth during checkouts, which means that the checkout itself gets slower. And refresh, and commit, etc.

     

    One is the history that you can see on the History tab of the Project Sharing dialog. It's purely for humans, if they care, and there's a button on the history pane that you can clear any time you feel like. It can also be cleared as part of the metadata process mentioned by your screenshot.

     

    The second item is detail on all changes by all users, ever. This gets used to know what objects to reconcile when you Refresh in a specific Working File. The project doesn't know what old un-refreshed working files might be out there, so there's no way for it to self-manage expiring and deleting the older change lists.  During the metadata cleanup all the old change lists get wiped and that's why everyone needs to refresh first or grab new working files after.

     

    VW2024 is tracking more detail, so these lists are getting bigger, faster. In Update 4 we bumped the trigger for this dialog from 50k to 200k, so you should see it a bit less often again, and only minimal difference in filesize or delays between Update 3 and Update 4 at the fullest point before the dialog shows.

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  2. The top and bottom of the Edit Data Vis dialog are currently quite separate.  The bottom ("Display Criteria") is only the mapping for what Values get what attributes, full stop.  It starts with all possible values it can find in the current document.  The top ("Object Criteria") refers to the drawing, selecting what objects you want to participate in data vis. 

     

    If you are saying there are drawing objects not getting colored properly, that would be a bug or behavior to investigate.  If you are saying you want the Object Criteria list to have fewer values by default, there is no way to do that today other than to not have those objects in your document, or to manually delete them from the list. And they will come back. That's not a bug. What color do you want if one of those undesirable bits of truss are used in the train for the first time?  Do you want to think about that when you're setting up the scheme, or later when it happens?   There are some enhancement requests for managing that bottom list of values, and when they're addressed we'll have to find a some balance between keeping inappropriate things off the list and allowing things that aren't used just yet.

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  3. Hey @Chris J Clarke , @Andy Broomell said pretty much everything I would.

     

    On 1/19/2024 at 1:14 PM, Andy Broomell said:

    The criteria for Data Vis is only to set which objects the Data Vis will re-color. It does not control which objects are visible in the drawing [list of values], as you're wanting it to.

    The bottom half of the dialog does in fact list everything it can find in the document that might be appropriate. You're asking for truss, so it has to list every resource that's currently possible. It would be painfully slow if it first had to use the criteria to find all possible affected objects, then traverse all those objects to only show their current values.  And if you started to use a new one in your drawing, suddenly your legend would out of date, and the visualization case might be unhandled, etc. That can still happen if you import a new resource, but you kind of more expect it there. Anyway, performance is the big reason.

     

    There are some enhancement requests for this, and the change would be useful. You aren't even running into the case where it does something like show all possible symbols, not just all truss. Those are the painful ones. I'm not sure where the enhancement sits in our backlog and roadmap. The Core team is involved in big feature tasks almost every year, like Viewport Styles in the last release.  I will remind them of this enhancement.

     

    Remember you can also export and import Data Vis definitions in the DV manager, if that helps you to do less work and reuse one without needing to re-edit the scheme.

     

    Hi @Wood/ @TomWhiteLight Re: autocolor, yes, you can choose a palette and the start and end colors on that palette.  You can also pick individual colors in the DV dialog, and then export that as a palette to make it easier to reuse your chosen colors in a future DV scheme.

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  4. This means something funny is going on with the file. Anyone who sees this, it means their working file has seen the project go forward in time normally (refreshed, pulled in some new changes), and then magically go backward in time (goes to refresh, sees the project file is now at an older state).

     

    This means a person or process has manually put an older version of the project in place. No one should ever be manipulating the project files at the OS level like this, so that's one thing you need to track down and make sure it doesn't happen again.  

     

    If you see this again after a reset, maybe someone didn't follow the guidance of discarding working files and creating new ones. Or maybe the bad thing was done a second time. If all else fails, you may need to save to a VWX file and set the project up all over again. But you really need to know who is copying and rearranging files and stop that.

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  5. I wanted to post a followup here where a lot of people can see this.  We continue to investigate, but this message might be the answer for one or more of you:

     

    For one of our users, it turned out that a Project File was in a place where it could be accessed via different technologies at the same time. After that there is no longer a single point governing exclusive access to changes, nor a single source of truth. Two users are able to make writes to the same file at the same time, and all guarantees go out the window. In short, server + cloud folder = not good.  Project Sharing Server + file server = not good.  SMB + AFP = not good. 

     

    When we see fundamental issues like this, we try to find ways to avoid the problem in the first place. Not always easy, when we have no idea how your IT infrastructure looks. SMB vs AFP is an example where we added a setting into the project file setup several versions back, so we could detect and warn if an SMB project was suddenly accessed via an AFP share.  We'll be revisiting these kinds of settings in VW2025 to detect things like cloud + non-cloud access, and adding some new alerts and info on dialogs and help. 

     

    Hope this helps somebody, let me know if you have any questions I can answer, and everyone have a good Thanksgiving later this week.

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  6. Let me check your understanding here: resources like classes or symbol definitions are not things that get checked out.  If more than one user makes changes to them, when the second person refreshes or commits, then Vectorworks will state that there is a resource conflict and ask which copy you want to keep.  Is that the behavior you are seeing?  The last person to commit is going to "win" and only their change will go in for that symbol.

  7. Your biggest performance bottleneck is always going to be copying the file from editor to server, then back out to all the users.  Any flavor of cloud service, that syncing is going to be triggered immediately by the service. So the more people in one location without something like Lan Sync, the bigger the chance you're saturating the network between the cloud and that group. And the more editors, or the closer in time those changes are, again, all roads leading toward network traffic. 

     

    When sharing a file on a server, obviously you're still pushing changes back and forth between the editor and master project file, but it no longer needs to broadcast copies out to everyone so the network performance demands aren't as great.

     

    In both cases, there's the coordination for when the project is ready and able to be physically changed on disk. For a server, that's just that the file is idle. Then the editor can refresh the working file and commit.  For cloud, a user might think that's all they are waiting for...the file to be idle. But it is also conflated with the extra cost of waiting for the cloud to sync the local cloud copy of the project up to date before you can even start.  Many changes in a short period of time, and each change by another editor moves the goalpost of when the local project is finally ready. 

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  8. The "bug" Iskra's post refers to is that Fonts of the same name might have different appearance (different font metrics) across the different platforms. (As an example, this article.) Not just VW, but Word, web pages, or any kind of document can suffer from this issue. In Peter's case, we need someone to investigate why Arial is getting substituted on the cloud in this particular case.

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  9. It's an interesting VE. The devil will be in the details. If it's at the file or folder level, it will be hard to manage. Can't make the user need to re-do it every Service Pack, but probably every Release.  Probably need a "reset" button somewhere obvious, that's also an indicator speciallized handling is going on. 

     

    A different way to approach things would be to tag the lights you like with something like 'nonvw'.  Then you can search on 'light nonvw' and get just what you want.

  10. There are a couple other things here you can use. In the Unit you can control the dimension precision separately from the unit itself.image.png

     

    Then there's another trick you can use, if you don't normally need to use dual imperial/metric units.  You can set up dual dimensions, but both as metric or both as imperial.  The secondary will take its precision from the secondary unit (there isn't a separate unit prec and dim prec like this image above for the primary).  In the Dim Std, you can set one standard to "Dual - use primary only" and a second to "Dual - use secondary only" and then you have two standards with different precisions.Screen Shot 2021-03-17 at 4.52.04 PM.png

     

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  11. Sorry @svluijk, it's very unlikely to change in 2020. Sp4 was already finished when you posted end of May; and the last service packs of a release (sp5 +) are only for the least risky things possible and apple's new releases of mac os.  At the time I judged it annoying, but probably not worth risking a new bug.

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  12. As you say, the main pane allows you to change multiple thumbs at once because you can select and see multiple thumbs at once.  The preview pane doesn't have any way to show more than one, so it's disabled during multi-selection. 

     

    Do you have a workflow in mind Tom?  Are you doing this once, when you make a new symbol, or are you repeatedly looking thru each item in the list from different angles, changing one over and over?  If there were defaults, what should they be?  (Tied to the main RM pane setting? Or the VW pref for 3D render mode + ?)

  13. I can answer some of the general issues raised by you and Tom, but I'll have to leave workflow to others. 

     

    Materials can be used by any plugin, but not all plugins or plugin developers have fully opted-in yet. Given that reporting was going to be a big part of the feature we tried to get all site-built architectural and terrain shaping parts working first, to deliver value there. Compare windows which aren't typically built on site vs curtain walls which have lots of material settings for the various frame and panel pieces. 

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