willofmaine

How do I exclude walls from the Structural Class when I select "Create Structural and Nonstructural Groups" for "Merge Cross Sections" for Section Viewports? (Section Viewport > Advanced Properties... > Attributes > Cut Plane"). I want my walls to be in the Nonstructural Group, but I can't seem to get them out of the Structural Group... Okay, in a test file it looks like walls, floor objects, and roof face objects are all considered by Vectorworks to be "structural objects"?? There's really no way to differentiate between, say, load-bearing walls and non-load bearing interior partitions?... ... ...

Thanks @Kevin McAllister! I only recently learned that one could open a VW file with TextEdit. But in all that gibberish, I didn't know what to look for. I don't think the VW 2008 = 13.0 helped but, now that I know that, there it is! Very helpful (as long as one remembers to deduct 5...)

We've temporarily abandoned project sharing. Did a "Save As..." to create a regular .vwx Vectorworks File. Now, when I change the "None" class to "Use at Creation," (even though I'd already previously done this during project sharing...) and select "No" for changing the attributes of objects previously created, Vectorworks freezes, apparently until I start the "Force Quit" process and/or just right-click on its icon in the dock. Worse, I can't update a section viewport that I recently created (during project sharing). There's no progress bar, a spinning beach ball, and, ultimately, the Activity Monitor says that Vectorworks is not responding. Project Sharing was looking great at first, but now I feel like it's plunged us into even more of a Vectorworks nightmare than is typical (which is a lot of nightmare...).

I guess now, maybe having reinstalled Dropbox, it's at least faster. Maybe 4 or 5 minutes instead of 20. In all cases, Dropbox appears to start with the full 200 MB, but maybe that's to be expected with "incremental" backups. (The original 200 MB plain .vwx file takes about 20 minutes to upload). But, it still seems like 4 or 5 minutes is quite a lot of time to Save & Commit after having only added a couple of circles and moved a rectangle (in my test working file)??...

I've installed Catalina. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Dropbox. I've recreated the project file from scratch. I've created brand new project files from small test projects. All to no avail. No matter what I do, Dropbox syncs the entire file with each and every commit. At one point I'd changed the backup location to my local drive, but then changed it back again. That (or something) resulted in a couple of .bak files, along with the file in the Vectorworks backup folder. Each of the .bak files (whatever those are) were a full 200 MB. Searching on Google for "Delta Sync" mostly gets me results for Smart Sync, or maybe an explanation of what Delta Sync is. But nothing about how to enable it.

Updating to Catalina does not seem to have helped. But at least a call to Vectorworks "Priority" Tech Support resulted in - for the first time ever - my having to leave a message with a promise from them that they would call back within one business day.

I did switch to SMB, but to no avail. But, also based on Jim's article, it looks like the current Mac OS is recommended. I'm on High Sierra (I've developed an aversion to what has often seemed like downgrading to the latest, "greatest" Apple OS...)... And it looks like Vectorworks 2018 doesn't run on Catalina, so, last night I "officially" switched to VW 2020 (transferred Libraries, etc.). So, I am apprehensively moments away from upgrading to Catalina; hopefully that will resolve this issue!! I can check everything off in that general Dropbox guidelines post you referenced. And your explanation of how to create a new project file - we are very much on the same page! Again, thank you very much for your thorough responses. I will let you know how it goes with Catalina.

If this PVA Jim guy is to be trusted (ha ha), it maybe looks like we should indeed be using SMB instead of AFP: see his post here.

Maybe the Network Protocol at Project Sharing Settings should be "Share Project File using SMB only" instead of "AFP" (currently selected) (whatever those are...). Might it be the backup file getting replaced (it's located in Dropbox in its own folder next to the project file)? Only problem with that theory is it's set to backup after every 5 commits, and we've only committed twice today, and both times were similarly problematic... Can I just delete the project file and create a new one from scratch (from a current, up-to-date, refreshed working file)? And, for the heck of it, maybe following some communication with the rest of the team... ... ...

I just had to commit the file again, and Dropbox is syncing over at least 190+ MB (file size is 204 MB at Dropbox). Also, oddly, there is no blue Dropbox syncing icon adjacent to the file (though the container folders do have them, and everything else has their green checks as expected...). It's looking for about 20 minutes to update. Did I miss a setting somewhere? This is not super ideal... Thanks!

I'd estimate something like 20 minutes, but, maybe more telling, when I checked it at a certain point, Dropbox was still syncing a substantial 80 MB or so...

So... I just committed changes to a project file so that I could release everything, but, for some time the team had no access to the project file (and Dropbox was syncing for a long while). I'd assumed that when committing changes, only the changes would be written to the project file. Is that not the case? It sort of seems like the entire project file is being overwritten (200 MB = time consuming...). Otherwise, the ability to release things individually is going well!

I found a Renderworks Camera sort of far away... like in another galaxy (literally: at x,y,z = 3.228'e97'!). Is trillions of trillions of miles too far???... (a file I inherited!...). So far, deleting the camera seems to have resolved the issue, so, Thank You!

Ha ha! Yes, that is a joke. "Time will tell," as they say, and time, years of it, is telling me that there's no interest in and/or ability to fix Vectorworks. Sorry if that may sound harsh, but, the combination of issues such as those represented by the attached images, and the frequency of such issues, is beyond discouraging. The tremendous investment I've made in Vectorworks, which is far beyond just financial, makes jumping ship incomprehensibly unappealing. Oh well, back to work. Maybe I can realize at least a few hours of billable work during my next eight hours with Vectorworks.

I (still) really wish that solids appeared as, well, solid red, instead of hollow, at the cut planes of clip cubes. VWIS051 And, maybe more, I especially wish that everything at the cut planes was snapable. VWIS051 And I also wish that we could snap to the geometry of symbols when the clip cube is on... (but this was "submitted to engineering" by Tech Support in December of 2014, so I'm not holding my breath...) VWIS039