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Is the door definitely correctly located as "door in wall" rather than "door" hidden in the wall. You have not loaded your test file correctly.

If you are using referenced viewports, you need to make sure that two options are set in the DLVP class properties: Make sure that class is updated from the reference source file - column 4 - the mountains in the picture frame. AND update from source file - column 5 - the curved arrow. A couple of other things can upset this, but normally they are set by default so you do not need to fiddle with the other settings.

OpenGL is available with non Renderworks versions. I think its as Pat says, they are greyed out as they are not supported by the graphics card.

You can create a file which has common functions and $include it into other scripts. However care is needed to make sure that you do not create inter functional dependencies.

Because it affects other layers.

I'm not after a cropped viewport. The mask will mask multiple areas of the underlying layer - so the mask needs to cover the whole underlying layer and not just a crop region. For instance, I may have a number of paths or terraces each textured with some pattern such as stipple, hatch, hardscape, I don't want the pattern to be across the whole area, just an indicative pattern in some areas of the plan. So I want to mask some of the patterns out, either fully, or partially with a semi transparent mask. Having the ability to place a hatch for example in a mask that would give the effect of rubbing the underlying part of the layer out with a scalpel would give the perfect graphic effect. At the moment, this is not possible without the layer being the bottom of the stack which cannot be done for other reasons.

I would like to be wrong, but I think that the 'mask' layer would affect all layers beneath not just the single layer.

I would like to have a layer mask. The layer mask should only affect the one layer. This is vitally important yet subtle difference to simply masking out via a single layer that would affect *all* underlying layers, not just detail on the single layer. So if I place a mask (a transparent line or polygon say), it blocks out detail from the layer, but not from layers beneath. Basically, I wish to have the ability to 'knock back' detail on a layer, but only in certain areas and only on the one layer.

Its not quote clear from your comment what your workflow is, but I personally do not recommend using rotated plan view as a permanent way of working. Rotate view is best used as a temporary function to work on parts of the plan that are are a pain when the tool is operating rotated - ie ovals and visually aligning and proportioning objects etc. Once you have placed and aligned everything, set the rotate plan view back to 0. If you want to permanently rotate a view/plan, use a viewport and rotate the viewport via the viewport OIP. That said, I have just tried it with 2009/SP4 and it seems fine with my basic tests however it also worked on 2008 so can you please give some more info. I basically drew a polygon and offset it, then rotated plan and offset again.

This is a very interesting observation. Are you definitely seeing VW using only two cores during an operation whereby multi processing is active (ie some rendering operations) or are you possibly seeing VW active on one core and other Windows/spplications using a second and subsequent core? What are the other two cores showing with regard to activity? If you are genuinely seeing VW using two cores on this operation (which not knowing spotlight, it doesn't sound like moving fixtures, unless in a rendered view, is a renderworks function) then this contradicts what NNA say regarding multi processor/core support - that is, only some aspects of renderworks support multi core/processor. If VW is genuinely using two cores in some of these operations, then I would like to think that VW is coded in a scalable way where the algorithm lends itself to parallel processing and not limit itself to just to cores. For instance, some render operations scale very well in a multi processing environment, where as some algorithms would be impossible to code to take advantage of multi processing.

I would suggest updating to SP3. The Landscape tool has been very buggy from the start and subsequent updates have made it better (although some broke functionality too) but I still believe that it gave incorrect results in SP2. The problem areas were down to counting plants and how percentages added up - possibly all linked to incorrect area calculation.

I like having Renderworks integrated into VW, but I can also see benefits of having it as a stand alone app - more memory would be available to both VW and RW without the footprint of the other plus one could still work on VW whilst rendering under RW. It could also lead to renderfarm type capabilities. But the tight integration between VW and RW should not be lost - possibly still all controlled within VW.

The VW manual is referring to 32 bit applications running on a 64 bit OS, not a native 64 bit app running on a 64 bit OS. The latter has the potential to be slower, possibly by a significant amount rather than a few %, than its 32 bit counterpart running on a 32 bit app. This is especially true for legacy applications that were designed many years ago that had a different set of design goals - possibly trying to squeeze as much data as possible into as small a RAM requirement. 2010 or whatever it will be called will never be designed for 64 bit short of a total rewrite. Vectorworks is a legacy application designed many years ago. Trying to shoe horn 64 bit functionality into a 32 bit (or even 16 bit) application is a non trivial task and at some point, considerable compromises are going to be made which are likely to largely negate the benefits of having a 64 bit application or totally alienate legacy 32 bit users. There are likely to be far more cost effective ways that Vectorworks can take advantage of the higher specced hardware that is available today than porting it to 64 bit. Hence my comment to Shaun about what bits of a 64 bit app are to him beneficial because there may be ways of achieving his requirements without resorting to the considerable effort and side effects of a 64 bit port.

Have these websites mentioned that 64 bit apps can be a lot slower than 32 bit apps? 64 bit apps are an advantage if 32 bit is being a hindrance. Otherwise, 64 bit apps have to move data in coarser chunks (64 bits rather than 32 bits). Unless the application has been fully optimised to work within this limitation, potentially a non trivial task, its going to suffer and it has the potential to suffer in a worse case scenario by 50% although the reality is that will not be the case. I know this as in my previous life I was a consultant who specialised in porting 32 bit apps to 64 bit platforms for a number of large multinationals and (now not so large) banks. Our hand was forced by a shift in processor availability (32 bit VAX was being replaced by 64 bit Alpha) rather than any desire for speed - probably 20% of the time was to port the app from 32 bit to 64 bit, 50% was optimising the 64 bit app to get it to run as fast as the 32 bit app (without losing significant speed of the 32 bit version) and 30% was testing it. For a legacy application, porting to 64 bit is non trivial and unless it gives any significant benefit, is likely to be detrimental in performance. There are better and easier ways of getting getting more performance out of a legacy application than simply converting to 64 bit without the detriment of the existing 32 bit customer base. Which is why I asked, what is it about 64 bit that YOU need. You may think that you want 64 bit, but in fact, its not going to give you any benefit and possibly be detrimental.

Hi Shaun Apologies in advance of playing devils advocate, but what is it about 32 bit that is holding YOU back? What advantage do you think that 64 bit bring you now? Exactly what 64 bit features are you after?

I don't think that quicktime gets involve in the graphics rendering. Animation stuff yes, but not stuff that is handled by GDI and OpenGL. Intersting comment about using Dell supplied drivers. I had assumed that the NVidia ones would be best as they would have the latest fixes - would the Dell ones not be lagging behind? I actually updated from 182.06 yesterday in the hope of fixing a blank screen when I some times resume. The power is the issue that I am concerned with. I don;t really want to get into having to swap power supplies as I have a maintenance deal with Dell - swapping a card is OK as I can just swap that back, but a PSU swap is a bigger step forward than I would like to take. How do I find out if my power supply will support a bigger card? Will it be marked somehow of have some spare flying leads? I don't believe that my CPU is the cause of the problem either. I'm not saying that performance is poor, its just not instant. I have checked my settings as suggested before and all were as expected - however, i'm not sure what half the settings on the card itself will have. What I suffer from is for instance panning and gradient fills, I can pan a fairly large drawing across the screen and stop, but it carries on moving for a number of seconds. It is this that I want to make more responsive.

You could convert to stake object and set the stake object to show the elevation as text. If you import a text file as survey data (a number of formats are available), it will give you stake objects automatically. You can then do a manual bulk select then set display to include elevation - do not set more to show as 2D graphic only as the elevation will be incorrect. Alternatively, if you have 3d points, you could try using get3dcntr to get the Z value and then display this as text next to the 3D point.

When scrolling/panning Vectorworks designs across the screen, the movement, for want of a better description, chugs. By the sound of it, it is possible to get pretty much a smooth operation in Vectorworks. I have a Dell PC with a GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics card and was thinking about upgrading it. The bus is PCI Express x 16. Does anyone have any experience of updating their graphics card? What benefits did you feel when running Vectorworks? I'm constantly zooming and panning around a drawing. My concerns are physical size, cooling/fan noise and power consumption. It would appear that the 8600GT was somewhat compromised, although on paper has a relatively low power consumption. How feasible is retro fitting an upgraded graphics card to an existing machine? I would like to stick with NVidia. I was thinking about something like the 9600GT. There seems to be many different varieties of the same chipset - what do I look out for as all on paper mostly seem identical whilst having a large variation in price even though the card is the same manufacturer. Or maybe there are simply some settings in the NVidia control panel what will make my existing card more responsive?

With 12.5 you will not get any benefit.

You can enable the switch when using any version of VW, but only 2009 (and presumably later) can take advantage of the additional user virtual memory (>2GB <3GB) that the switch provides.

I have this on my laptop but not my desktop. For me, it was related to my zoom % - the more I zoomed in, the more chance that the rotate/move would crash - the amount seemed to be about 300% zoom, above 300% zoom, VW would crash, without fail.

Thanks Dave.

Actually it will. You simply adjust the amount of user address space accordingly. It may not give you an additional 1GB but you could still get more than 2GB. Also, the 3GB switch controls the user/kernel split of virtual memory rather than RAM. I don't know for sure, but just because a graphics card has 1GB, it may not necessarily follow that it needs 1GB of kernel mode virtual memory.

Plus Vectorworks is not colour management aware so if you have a calibrated printer, you need to use Acrobat (or another application)

What variant of Vectorworks 2008 do you have? The fundamentals version does not allow for PDF import.