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Please fix the Window PIO for the next release!


Christiaan

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Please please please fix the window PIO for the next release. I really want our office to be using window PIOs but there're a slew of simple reasons why we can't.

Check out attached image. It's meant to be a window with an external stone sill, but where's the internal sill in plan and what are those lines on each side where the external sill extends beyond the jamb?

These are not the only problems (feel free to link to or note other problems) but they're a good example of bugs that are highly limiting and should have been dealt with long before now in a maintenance release.

Also see 3D view where brick shows through sill (there may be a fix for this, anyone?)

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Christiaan, I believe those lines extending into the sill are zero-thickness jambs.

Like you, I think that a major overhaul of the window and door PIOs would be a tremendous boost to VW's utility and sales. I hope that NNA agree and follow through with a thorough job of polling architects in the trenches and in different regions to come up with something spectacular.

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I couldn't agree more. Openings, walls, and slabs (i.e. floor and roof objects) make up the core of what most of us (the architectural community) depend on. These elements need to be absolutely tight in their functionality.

The windows have improved dramatically in recent releases, but they still have quirks that routinely require me to explode them and recreate them manually!

In addition to Christiaan's examples:

? Trim will cause the Section viewports to notch out a cavity of the adjacent wall.

? Texture mapping on the perimeter of the window opening is out of synch with the siding.

? Accessing the window controls is cumbersome i.e. changing the class of the ID is a multi-step process, and any meaningful universal control over windows and doors is lacking ...

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What would be super helpful, rather than talking about the need for improvements, is to list out the improvements you are looking for and need. Please try to include as much detail as possible. Images complimenting the request are always encouraged.

As always, please be sure to report quality issues to bugsubmit@nemetschek.net in addition to posting them here.

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Katie, I know everyone at NNA is super busy, and you're probably at the limit - but to implement your idea, I wonder if it would be possible to dedicate a couple of forums (fora?) on this board to specific issues, so that you could accumulate the wisdom of a variety of users and so that we could all benefit from the dialog and refinement that would generate?

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Everyone,

Thanks for your concern/input regarding the Window (& Door) PIOs. Please be assured that this particular topic has been under consideration/work for a while. But there is a great deal of work to do, so it will take time. I have been intimately involved in seeing these tools evolve for the future. It is a complicated project, with many, many issues and challenges and we wish to move in a direction, this time, that is much more definitive, that is, reducing the amount of radical redesign we seem to have done in the past from major version to major version. Our beta testers have given us a geat deal of help and input toward the design of the evolution of these tools and I look forward to the results... but be patient.

We are actively persuing bug fixes for the next release, but, at this time, I can't promise you anything more than that. That is not to say that the bug fixes aren't significant or helpful, on the contrary. Please keep logging/submitting bugs and please consider using the bug submittal option to log wishes, also. Just prepend the title of your bug with "[WISH]-Door / Window PIO - " and I'll be sure to collect them.

Regards,

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Jeffrey, this is excellent news and your approach is thoughtful and understandable. The bug submittal route is a very useful tool, but I think that an open dialog could be incredibly helpful as well.

Christiaan, by a Wiki do you mean an online document that can be edited by anyone? So that your ideas could be modified or deleted by someone else, and no trace would be left of them? I'd rather see a series of threads, and, if NNA has the resources, a software design guide that incorporates what are perceived as the best ideas and directions, that would evolve and provoke additional thoughts and comments.

For starters, I'd suggest that Windows & Doors, Worksheets, and Section Viewports would be interesting topics.

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Christiaan, by a Wiki do you mean an online document that can be edited by anyone? So that your ideas could be modified or deleted by someone else, and no trace would be left of them?

No, that's not how a Wiki works Pete. A Wiki keeps a log of every change made and can be rolled back at any time to any point. What wikis do best is allow a group to distil a discussion into the most important points. What a threaded forum does best is facilitate a discussion.

I'd rather see a series of threads

The problem with discussion forums is they're linear and get filled up with stuff that's unimportant to a person reading it later; you end up having to read an entire thread when the information you need is only a small component of the discussion.

Even better NNA could install a Xserve in October, which includes a built-in very easy to use Wiki (much easier than others available):

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/wikis.html

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How do you know what's worthwhile unless you read it?

I don't understand. That's a bit like asking how do you know if a book is good unless you get to read all the authors notes as well.

How do you ensure that what floats to the top is cream and not crap?

If you've got crap participants the crap will float to the top. If you've good participants the cream will float to the top. It's exactly the same as a discussion. Crap people, crap discussion. Et cetera.

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A wiki is a much harder interface to moderate and manage. Rolling back to a previous log in a wiki is not as easy as it sounds ... and who decides what is important and what isn't important.

With a forum thread, you can view everything and see the evolution of dialog. You lose the evolution of dialog in a wiki.

I'm not here to argue over what a wiki can or cannot do.

The point is we do not have a wiki employed. We do have a forum employed. I will be added the additional discussion areas this afternoon.

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A wiki is a much harder interface to moderate and manage. Rolling back to a previous log in a wiki is not as easy as it sounds ...

With MediaWiki software, it's four clicks: history > dated version > edit > save.

and who decides what is important and what isn't important.

The participants. Wikipedia works extremely well and that's full of contentious issues, conflicting interests and even anonymous editors. Studies show that they work even more smoothly with members of similar interests that are not anonymous (such as a VectorWorks wiki).

I know it can sound scary to some. Contrary to the belief that we live in democracies we largely don't. We're closer to oligarchies, derived mostly from patriarchal societies. In such societies you have knowledge gatekeepers and a general understanding that it's unthinkable that people can think for themselves.

With a forum thread, you can view everything and see the evolution of dialog. You lose the evolution of dialog in a wiki.

But that's precisely the advantage. They're not mutually exclusive; you can have both and you can refer one to the other at will.

I'm not here to argue over what a wiki can or cannot do.

Well, except that that's precisely what you're doing.

The point is we do not have a wiki employed. We do have a forum employed. I will be added the additional discussion areas this afternoon.

Yeah that's cool. All I'm saying is that wikis are very useful for summarising and reporting such info.

The only caveat is that wikis are not as easy to use as forums, but as I've noted that's all about to change in October when Apple releases Mac OS X Server 10.5

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Christiaan, I get your point about Wikis. On the ohter hand, I'd say that it would be a big step to get some focused discussion going, as Katie says she can do with the resources available to her. If it at some point it looks as though the Wiki format is needed to sharpen the focus, maybe NNA would be willing to work on that.

What I envision as key (and acknowledging the oligarchy we're dealing with, i.e., Katie and her colleagues run the company!), is that NNA at some point would post what their engineers consider to be the design direction for the next generation Window & Door PIOs. Call it a kind of open engineering experiment in software design where end users could participate BEFORE everything gets locked into millions of lines of code.

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