screen res / toolbars

[mcqueenhomes]

All,

I discovered this tinkering on my own and thought others might want to know.

As the Chief 8 manual says, the toolbars are set for the screen resolution active at the time of installation. No option to change this later on. I had mine at 1024x768 when I installed.

But I like to full render at 800x600, since it's faster by orders of magnitude. (Ol' P4 1.5 gettin' up there).

If you ever want to change the toolbars to fit a new resolution, here's how it's done:

1. Make sure Chief Architect isn't running.

2. In your main Chief 8 directory (where the main program file is) note the following files:
10x7-2-row-custtb.dat
10x7custtb.dat
8x6custtb.dat.
These are the default toolbar files. 8x6 means 800x600, 10x7 means 1024x768, etc.
Also note the custtb.dat file in with the others. This is the toolbar file your Chief 8 is using now.

3. Move the custtb.dat to somewhere else if you want to save it.

4. Copy the default toolbar .dat file for the resolution you want into another folder temporarily, then rename it to custtb.dat.

5. Cut the new custtb.dat from its temporary location and paste it back to the main Chief 8 directory. If asked if it's OK to overwrite, click Yes.

6. If you want to go back, copy your backup custtb.dat from step 3 back to the main Chief directory.

I hope this is useful.

[Tim]

Did not work for me. In fact it built walls in a plan that I had already breaklined and deleted and also reset the layers to show all. Very strange!

Don't try this one at home folks!

[mcqueenhomes]

I'm not sure why that happened. I didn't notice anything different about my plans when I tried it the first time. It worked sooo good!

I shouldn't be surprised, though. This sort of thing happens at my work a lot, when we are forced to "drive a screw in with a hammer," so to speak.

Is there a better way?

I guess you all can try at your own risk, make sure you haven't p-o'd your computer lately! It's not an everyday sort of thing anyway.

[Tim]

I was an idiot for trying it! That little move has cost me three or more hours!! I'm still adding time to the clock! I knew better!

It jacked up my layouts!

[Dermot Dempsey]

Tim,

I have no idea what you did or what happened on your system but I don't think there is any possible way that copying or renaming the toolbar configuration files could mess up an existing Chief plan. The worst case senario for doing this is that your toolbars get trashed and when you start up Chief you have no tools. This is relatively easy to fix as long as you kept copies of the toolbar files that shipped with Chief and any that you have customized yourself.

Chief will only read the file named custtb.dat when you start the program and use what ever tools have been setup in that file. You can create as many different toolbar configurations as you want and give them different filenames to change your toolbars using this rename/copy method. We will have support for having separate toolbar configurations directly in Chief in the future which will make this much easier.

[Tim]

Hey Dermot,

I have never had a problem with 8.0 at all. Just this week I have had Chief crash twice in two days while editing in a camera view.

My box has issue with other programs as well. It all started after a friggin windows update two weeks ago. Format coming just as soon as I can get these 12 drawing projects out. Chief sure has turned my company around!

[mcqueenhomes]

Thanks a bunch Dermot, you really saved my face on this one! I knew it should work!