I.
Stop!! Don't do another thing until you've read this entry. This usually is the result of a cockpit error - you saved an empty plan over your work. This is exacerbated by the peculiar way that Punch! treats the initial "new" file it opens when it starts (explained further below). So, First: rename your model file (xyz.pro) to something like SAVE.pro, and then make a copy of it to the original model name. That saves your original file just in case you need it later. Use the copy that has the original name on it. Use the procedure I've just given you to do that - the order is important.
If you are using a Punch! version from Platinum forward and you have undo turned on, then you may be saved. The undo feature in Punch! works by saving a full version of your model after every significant change. This can make interaction slow, but if you ignored the slowness, then there are n copies of your plan saved, where n is the undo depth you've set up to keep. So do this:
Locate the main Punch! folder (where you originally installed it). Inside that folder will be a folder name "Data". Make a copy of this folder to some other place, say, c:\. Go to the copy and enter the folder. You will find a number (n) of files with names like "ProDataXX.dat", where XX is a number from 1 to n (if the names are there but they don't have the .dat on the end of the names, see the note above Commandment I that starts "Do you want to save..."). If you look at the file details View->Details you'll see the files' sizes and date of creation. Start with the latest: rename the file to "ProDataXX.pro", and open it in Punch! to see if it has your data in it. Note that the last few things you did may not be present. If you find your data, copy that over your model .pro file, open it, and make sure everything is ok, before deleting SAVE.pro and the copied Data folder.
If you can't find it, that means you did too many things in the interim, and the undoes involved in those things have driven your data off the end of the undo queue. If that's the case, then the original file may be your only way back. Due to the way that Windows works, when you copied the empty file over the old one, Windows keeps all the data in the file beyond where the empty file quits. This data is deleted in any copy of the file you make, so it's important that the original file be retained, not simply a copy of it. That's why we did the peculiar save that I specified above. Zip that original file, and send it to Lmc@ThistleKeep.com with a message about what happened. You may be missing some objects that got overwritten, but the bulk of the data may be recoverable, if the file is the original. There is no cost for this service, and there are no guarantees either, of course.
II.
No Textures Allowed - "When I texture something, nothing happens."
You may be the victim of a poison pill. A poison pill is an illegal number (the result of a zero division) built into some part of your plan, usually, but not always, a 3D object. The symptom of a pill, and the reason it is named so, is that if there is a pill in a drawing, adding texture to a surface will suddenly stop working for the whole drawing. You can try to eliminate it by copying your plan, and deleting half the things in it, and see if texturing is restored. If it is, you deleted the pill; bring back your whole plan and delete only half of what you deleted before. If it still doesn't work, then delete half of what remains and try again; keep going this way until you isolate the single object that causes the error; delete just that in your other copy, and you're home free. It usually is odd in some way or other, looking like a small knot of jumbled text or something similar, but not always. If it si a wall or roof object, it may give itself away by a free-floating text describing a dimension - a text piece reading 0" out in the middle of empty space is a giveaway; also typing ctrl-A (command to select all) and seeing selection handles out where nothing else exists can locate a pill.
If you can't find it, zip a copy of your plan and send it to Lmc@ThistleKeep.com. Write in your e-mail that you think you have a poison pill you need eliminated. I will look and delete it for you, as I have access to programming tools and techniques not known to mere mortals. But I'm a kindly curmudgeom-wizard, and I'll do it for free.
III.
Textures Everywhere - "When I try to texture something, the texture gets all over another wall (or the ground surface)."
When Punch! creates an opening in a wall for a door or window, it does this by drawing the opening on the wall and marking that shape transparent. That works fine, but the wall is still there. When you "shoot" texture through the opening towards another object, it will hit the transparent surface first, and Punch! will then color the wall (the part of it that's not transparent) rather than what you were shooting at. The same thing goes for the hole in the terrain created by the excavation tool or by the grass cutting effect of a building's exterior walls. To fix this, get closer to the object to be textured, so the transparent wall is behind you rather than between you and where you are aiming. This ia a particular problem for doors; only the near edges of the door frame (if it opens away from you) can be reached for texturing.
There is another version of this problem. Floor cutouts on floors below will appear and move around on an upper floor. This problem ended in version 8.0 and up, so I assume there was some fix made by Punch! to eliminate it.
IV.
The Missing Pieces - "When looking at my model in LiveView, pieces are missing."
There is a bug (apparently in some OpenGL implementations - OpenGL is the graphics library built into your video driver) that occurs for some users. The symptoms are that whole objects disappear in LiveView; if the disappeared object is selected and moved a slight amount - say, nudged once in any direction - that object suddenly appears in LiveView. Some other object may disappear, and even that nudged object may later disappear again. Punch! has not been able to reproduce the problem, so there is no fix for it. It has been reported in every version of Punch! from Super through AS4000. To make OpenGL run as best it might, see Article V below.
Personally, I had this problem for quite a while, until I upgraded my video to an ATI Radeon controller. Since that time the problem has been totally absent for me. Therefore, I probably won't ever know if the problem is ever fixed in any other way.
V.
Video Problems - "I have smeared textures / bleed through from one side of a wall to another / oddly textured pieces in my LiveView, or LiveView crashes Punch! / my whole Windows session, or my LiveView won't automatically update or finish LiveView animation with a full update."
Punch! uses OpenGL, a 3D graphics engine built into most all PC video drivers. Like all software, OpenGL changes over time, and new Punch! versions use these changes, which often speed up rendering. Therefore it is important that the video driver and associated parts be kept up to date. Try these four steps:
- First: go to the video driver setup on your PC (the way to get there is different for different versions of Windows; for most, click on an empty part of the windows desktop, click on Settings->Advanced->TroubleShoot). Back the accelerations slider all the way to the left, turning off accelerations, and OK out. Obviously, this will slow down the video to some extent. If this helps the problem, you can try going back in and restoring the accelerations by steps until the problem reappears, and then backing off that last step, but often that first step is the one that causes the problems seen.
- While you are in Settings, make sure that the color quality setting is 24 or 32 bits per pixel ("True Color"). The 16 bits per pixel is the absolute minimum that it should be set at.
- Go onto the web to the website that your video card manufacturer has set up (it can be found using any search engine and the manufacturer's name and the card model). Look for downloads, and go see if you have the latest version of driver software for your model of video card (you can find your current driver's version at Video Settings->Advanced->Adapter). If there is a newer one for your card and the operating system you are running, download and install it using the manufacturer's directions.
- Click on Start->Run and type in "dxdiag", and click Run. The DirectX diagnostic will run, and tell you what version of DirectX you are currently using. Go out to www.microsoft.com/directx, and see what version is current. If your version is not current, read the install instructions, the system requirements and the FAQ. It is recommended that you download the latest version and install it, unless you are using Windows 95.
And really finally, I'll put a plug in here for ATI. ATI's cards and drivers (especially their CATALYST product) have proven to be tops for accelerator accuracy, while nVidia seems to have more than its share of problems in this regard. I'm running an ATI Radeon 9550 at the moment at full acceleration, without problems of any kind - the missing objects problem in Article IV seems to have gone away as well. It's wonderful...
VI.
Creepy Holes in the Ground -
These shapes are holes in the terrain; the brown is the brown "earth" showing though the holes. They occur between pairs of independent exterior wall sets. This is a bug in versions of Punch! up until AS4000. There is no known fix, but Master Landscape Pro (10.5) appears to not have this problem any longer.
VII.
Grass in the Basement -
"I have grass in my basement (or elsewhere inside the house)."In versions of Punch from Pro forwards, the exterior wallset eliminates grass inside the house (for Super, 5-in-1, Complete and Ultimate, there is no fix; these versions were not designed to support basements.) If there is still grass inside, it's likely because the exterior walls do not form a complete ring. As exterior walls are drawn, a very faint blue is added to the plan where the autofloors will be and where the grass is cut out (you can visualize that easier if you have turned on a grid on the plan, as the blue covers it over). If these blue surfaces form odd shapes inside the house, the walls are not properly joined, and need to be adjusted. If you want grass cut elsewhere besides inside exterior walls, the excavation tool (in version 4.5 and later) will do that.
Another cause for this problem is the joining of two exterior wall circuits, as when creating a design with split levels. If you have two circuits that have to reside matched together along a wall (even if their elevations will allow them to nest together), the grass-cutting fails on one side or the other when they actually meet. To keep this from happening, you can allow the walcenter lineses to come very close together but not actually touch. This will leave a small, thin strip of grass where they don't quite meet. The picture on the right shows the effect as two exterior wall circuits elevated 24 inches off the ground are brought close, merge and then thcenter lineses meet; the brown rectangles below are the holes cut in the grass through which the brown earth cube is visible.A further cause is that in version 7.0, Punch! made a change that requires that the specific floor that is creating the hole in the ground be identified (before this, the widest extent of all the floors was used). The way they did it was to restrict the number of floors which could have the autofoundations turned on to one, and that is the one used for the hole. Having autofoundations turned off on all floors will leave the grass uncut.
I recently ran into a set of four walls in AS4000 that look fine, but when rotated around 180 degrees, fill up with grass. It appears to be related to the problem cited above of two sets of exterior walls meeting. I can't reproduce the effect, and I can't figure out what is odd about these walls yet, but I found that they can be fixed by deleting one of the walls and redrawing it.
When running LiveView, it is normal for the grass to appear inside the house while movement of the viewpoint is occurring, but it should disappear once movement in Liveview ceases. This is due to the way Punch! tries to accelerate on-the-fly rendering, so it appears smoother. See The Ten COmmandments of LiveView for more discussion and a fix.
VIII.
Who'd Biting the Corners off the Roof? - "My floor/roof panel/deck is not shaped in Liveview the way it appears on the plan. There are corners cut off or other cuts made that aren't part of what I drew."
In some cases floors and roof panels were sometimes randomly chopped up in rendering, particularly if they contained concave parts. This problem appears to have been fixed in version 8.0 and up; for example, it appears in AS3000-7 but not in AS3000-10. Otherwise, make sure your shape doesn't cross over itself; that is a sure-fire way to get chops. Short of that, the best way to overcome this is to break up the floor/roof into simpler convex-only pieces, like triangles and rectangles.
IX.
Psychodelic Walls -
"My floor has slashes and jagged colors that dance about and flash violently when I move around."The picture at the right shows two walls which are mostly overlapping, but offset so the ends are visible. One is green, the other red. Their common areas occupy the same position exactly, thanks to the snap mechanism which makes them identically placed. The pattern is the result, and the pattern flashes violently when the viewpoint is moved the least amount. This is characteristic of a pair of surfaces that are identically placed; the computer can't figure out which one is closest to the viewpoint, so it uses tiny imaginary differences to choose one, then the other, then back over large and small pieces of the surfaces. This is easily fixed by removing one of the surfaces, or if both are required, move one of them as little as .1" away from the other with a nudge, so that one is definitely closer to the viewpoint. Having two surfaces together like this is seldom called for, so suspect a drawing problem in the design when this happens, like a duplicated wall or floor.
X.
A Better Mouse Trap - "The mouse is too sensitive to allow navigation in LiveView. Is there any way to reduce it's sensitivity?"
No, not directly. There are several things to try:
First, use the slider at the bottom of the LiveView window to set the slowest speed.
Second, turn off all the LiveView inhibits (down the right side of the LiveView windoes, or in version 8 and up, the pencil icon at the top of LiveView). They are there to speed up rendering when the problem is too slow.
Third, if still too fast, select some nice, complicated curved objects - like the six-chair dining room sets - and copy two or three to your design. They can be off to the side and elevated so they are invisible below the ground surface. Later, as LiveView starts slowing down as your design becomes complicated, delete them one by one.
Fourth, go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Mouse, and turn down mouse speed and accelerations.
Finally, learn to use the mouse with finesse. Also, note that the viewpoint is visible on the plan. Instead of navigating the viewpoint, use the mouse to drag the viewpoint across the plan to where ever you need it to be. The triangle indicates the view direction - it is likewise moveable by being dragged with the mouse around the viewpoint.turn down the mouse sensitivity in the Control Panel->Mouse control, develop a light hand for using the mouse.
XI.
Need Finer Dimensions - "I need to get measurement in inches with fractions/millimeters/inches without feet/other formatting options."
The good news is that measurements in Punch! are recorded to five digits accuracy in inches, which means accuracy to better thhan 1/10 of an inch even at the extreme edges of the Punch! lot. There are mechanisms for setting that accuracy as well; see here for a discussion on that topic. The bad news is that you can set accuartely, but Punch! rounds the displayed dimensions to the nearest inch or centimeter. However, if you have a "PowerTool-enabled"I version of Punch!, I have created the PlansPlus PowerTool with the Dimensions in Detail add-on which will allow you to format and display dimensions in hundreds of ways, including decimal and fractional inches, feet and inches, millimeters, and other options. See here for details.
Punch! has fixed this problem at least partially in version 10.0 and up; there are now more options in the Units dialog, including deeper precision. Unfortunately, they have made the decision that when you display or enter a fractional or decimal value of inches, they will round that value to the nearest fractional inch value you have selected in the Options->Units of Measurement... dialog. The selections are 1", 1/2", 1/4", 1/8" and 1/16", so you can neither display nor set a value in Punch! finer than that, and setting to a 0.1 inch, for example, is impossible; it will be changed to .125 inch. (Metric is handled in increments of .1mm, which works well, as long as you require nothing finer.)
XII.
Double-Clicking on Punch! Documents - "I cannot get Punch! to open a document (.pro file) by just double-clicking on it, as is normal for Windows apps. If I set up an association between the .pro extension and Punch! to make that happen, I get errors about the undo files and an inability to find sky1,ptx and ground1.ptx. What is this all about?"
Punch!, for whatever reasons, does not have the ability to be started by double clicking a document. If someone smart about how Windows does such things attempts to force it to do so by setting up an association between Punch! and the .pro file extension, that results in the errors mentioned asbove. Punch! must be started itself first, and then the File->Open or File->Open Recent options must be used to open a document.
XIII.
Can't Enter Measurements - "When I try to type an amount in an objects's property box, it doesn't 'take', or it results in a nonsensical result."
Two reasons: if you are trying to change an angle or pitch measurement in metric, first switch back to the english system, make the change, and then switch back to metric (see the probelm just below this one). Secondly, be aware that when you enter a value in the properties menu into the properties bar of any version at or higher than 7.0 (original AS3000) that you need to hit the Enter key after entering the value. Merely moving the cusrsor to another box (or using the Tab key) will not complete the desired change in the value.
XIV.
Flakey Angles - "When I type in an angle into [door position angle, rotation angle] control, the number goes crazy and returns a random angle."
This happens in versions of Punch! before 8.0, and when using metric units. The fix is to momentarily switch back to english units, set the rotation angle, and then return to metric.
XV.
Area Calculations Off - "My area calculations are wrong or they fluctuate largely with small changes."
Early versions of Punch! were not very good at computing square footages. the algorithm used is one of counting ona agrid the number of grid cells who's center were within the circuit to be measured; in early Punch! that grid wa srather rough, and measurements could vary up to 10%. In later versions the grid size was reduced, and the accuracy got better. Unfortunately, in AS3000 some bug was introduced into the calculation that messed up area calculations, but it has been fixed in AS4000.
XVI.
Attachments on Walls - "Punch! keeps complaining about a wall not being big enough to hold all the attachments. It obviously was."
Computing attachments is a tough thing to do - I know, because I wrote the BreakAll PowerTool that has to handle walls and attachments all the time, in lots of dicey situations. But indeed, there are errors in the way Punch! decides that attachment cannot fit together on walls, particularly in view of the fact that it is possible to stack windows and doors into the same space by simply moving them there. What's even worse is that Punch! doesn't give you a choice about it, when mentioning that you are going to loose all your attachments; it is already done, in effect, and it is telling you that after the fact. When you see the error dialog, they are gone - no way to back out - except by using that heaven-sent undo feature.
XVII.
Difficulties in Selecting - "I cannot select a wall/floor/other part because another floor/wall/other part gets selected instead."
The easiest way to fix this is to move the selected object out of the way using nudges, which can be easily reversed after you've finished by simply nudging in the opposite direction. There are some tricks: in most cases, if you can select some other part of the object you seek, then go back and select the edge you want, that will often do it for you. Roof panels can be done this way; also, selecting the centered "down arrow" will also work for them.
XVIII.
Wall Lengths Don't Add Up -
"I find that some wall lengths are incorrect by up to a few inches."When a wall is joined to two other walls at it's ends, it's length will always be exact (but, of course, displayed rounded off to the nearest inch, but nonetheless exact internally). However, many walls in Punch! "meet", but are not joined - for example, an interior wall meeting the middle of an exterior wall. The measurement is made to the end point of the wall, which may be several inches from where it should be, since the end point of such a wall depends on how the user ended the wall. Ideally, the endpoint should rest on the centerline of the wall it meets, but errors of half the wall's width are common. The plans drawn by the PlansPlus PowerTool avoid this problem by computing where the wall should end rather than where is really does end.
Late model Punch! essays a fix to this by preventing a wall being extended beyond the first wall it encounters, but that stops it right at the edge of the wall it encounters, not at the center, so the situation in the picture at right still pertains. Both walls depicted are set to dimensions at centers; if that is changed to surface, then the measurements become equal.
XIX.
Roof Length Notes Are Wrong - "The length along the sides of a roof panel are sometimes right, sometimes wrong."
The lengths displayed along the edges of a roof panel are the length as projected onto the horizontal plane, but roofs are not generally specified that way. Those sides that are parallel to the ground are correct, those that ascend or decend (the "rake" edges) are shortened propertional to the tangent of the roof pitch. This error is compounded by being transmitted through the Framer into the Estimator PowerTool, causing rafter lengths to be too short. See The Ten Commandments of Roofs for more explanation and illustrations. Again, the PlansPlus PowerTool avoids this problem by offering an option that does the appropriate lengthening of the rafters. Unfortunately, that result cannot be transmitted to the Estimator, so it continues to give wrong rafter lengths. In addition, this projection problem is also present in the depiction of skylights (in version 10) being displayed longer in the direction of the roof vector than should be the case, unrealistically large for their commanded lengths. See the PlansPlus User Guide for details.
XX.
Fireflies - "Version 10 users: There are fireflies in my house."
Before version 10 Punch! turned off lights when you were not in the room. In version 10, that inexplicably stopped, and the glows from lighting are visible throughout the house. They seem to be transparent to all Punch! objects, so they show up outside the house and inside, whenever a light, regardless of what lies between, is in the field of view. The only fix is to turn the lights off yourself, individually, since there is no single universal light switch.The TKE PowerTool InSync will have to power to do that. Info is available here.
