draft 8 bugs

[A.J. Design]

I use Draft 8 for plotting mold designs, and I have noticed a couple of weird things;

1) it seems to take an awful long time to move entities around the screen. When I first installed 8 it was very fast (i run a pentium 3 550 MHz with 1024MB SDram), and now the system seems as slow as my 90MHz!

2) when I go into a file that has already been saved, with dimensions, it will prompt me with dialog boxes saying "Warning, selected entities do not intersect."

. . . thanks in advance

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A.J. Ellis

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

When was the last time you ran "Defrag" on your system? Do that first. Even if it says that you do not need to do it, do it anyway. Defrag is routine system maintenance that needs to be performed on a REGULAR basis as well as scan disk.

One other thing;

Look in your Draft8CommonTemp folder and empty that out. Mastercam should empty that out when it exits. If you run simultaneous sessions this can cause the temp folder to fill up and thus reduce system performance.

James Meyette

James Meyette

[A.J. Design]

I run a defrag about once a month, and all temp folders on the system are cleansed! I think the same way you do, first I try to troubleshoot the crud out of the box, and then I do it again! I am left wondering because this works on all of my other software, including other cad software, but does not work with Mastercam for some reason.

Get this: I installed Draft7 on this box a while back, and when I would move geometry around, the system would pause for a while, then 2 gigs worth of space would dissappear! I exit Mastercam, and the 2 GB are still gone. Then, when I re-open Mastercam, the 2 gigs return . . .strange! I tried everything I know, as far as cleaning up my drives. My system has 2 hard drives, so i have my pagefile.sys split between the two so as not to bog one down.

Now with Version8, this does not happen, but I still feel something is weird. Also, the "uninstall" feature in 7 would not let me uninstall - at all.

Thanks James

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A.J. Ellis

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

When you Translate geometry, the database still has the original information in it, so you may want to to run "RAM SAVER" on your files. The more stuff you move, the more times you move it the more the database gets cluttered.

I personally run defrag 1x per week (friday afternoon) Windows seems to always make a mess of things.

James Meyette

[A.J. Design]

. . . thanks for the ram-saver tip James.

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

It's my pleasure.

James Meyette

[Andreas Stute - InterCAM]

Hi,

turn off the OpenGL function in screen, configure, screen -> "Enable OpenGL drawing". When there is a line style in drawings that is not supported under OpenGL, it slow down the system.

I test it yesterday with an customer file under v8 and it works when OpenGl is not active.

Andreas

[gms1]

Makes having a 1ghz 512mb rdram seem all the more better

[A.J. Design]

Thanks Andreas, I tried that, but it didn't seem to have any effect. What do you guys think should be a good ram allocation in the screen configure box? I tried changing that too, with no effect.

gms1, the system I am getting built now has rdram. You say you have 512mb with a 1ghz processor - do you like it? My system will be very close to what you have . . .

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A.J. Ellis

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

I usually run with 1/2 of my RAM (so for me that would be 256MB allocated to Mastercam as I have 512MB RAM in my PIII-500MHz)

The main numbers you'll want to change in your allocations is the Database Allocation. The other settings will not have as profound an effect on performance as this one.

James Meyette

[A.J. Design]

. . so I allocated half of my ram (thanks James).

Get this: . . . I also notice that when I translate geometry, the result has copied certain things that weren't supposed to be copied. I have 0 in the "number of steps" box. That wouldn't matter anyway though, because if it were multiple steps, the resulting geometry would not be directly on top of the existing geometry, unless I copied it that way. It seems that the incident I just encountered copied dimensions only, but this is definetely a bug. I will then do a delete all duplicate entities command, and the duplicate dimensions remain. I am sure that I have "move" selected, and not "copy". This seems to really slow my system down. If I have to move things several times, I find that I have to manually delete the same dimension multiple times, 20 or so deletions for the same dimension piled on top of itself. And when I have a complete mold design with several hundred dimensions, this can get very time consuming!

p.s. it also takes an awful long time to delete entities.

 

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A.J. Ellis

[A.J. Design]

o.k. do what James said ! ! !

I have consistently been using ram-saver and it works very well! I notice that it cleans up each file very well. When I do this after each translation, I notice that it is able to get rid of quite a bit of information.

thanks ! ! ! ! ! !

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A.J. Ellis

[Andreas Stute - InterCAM]

cooment from CNC Software: --- "Delete/Duplicate has never worked with Dimensions"

There is no work around to find duplicate Dimensions. Just delete pice by pice.

Andreas

[Toby]

If there was any toolpaths attached to some geometry and then one was to duplicate (accidentally) geometry on that same level, then if you punch Delete/Duplicate/entities it would promp that toolpaths were attached and posibly mess up your needed paths. Since the potential for duplicate geo exists it seems that there should be more to the prompt that would eliminate duplicate entities but not adversly affect toolpaths. does the M/C lock function allow one to do this or would this be a good add on besides being careful?

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Toby Baughman

Magic Mfg

[This message has been edited by toby (edited 12-21-2000).]

[Christian Raebild]

A comment on RAM allocations. The specific values have a profound effect on the speed of the system, and even on the stability of Mastercam.

It is the database and toolpath allocations, which are the issue. With no geometry loaded, you total RAM allocation should be 1/2 to 3/4 of the RAM installed. Also, the values should conform to the format (2^n)*1000, where n is an integer, i.e. the values for database and toolpath allocations should be numbers like 8000, 16000, 32000, 64000, 128000, etc.

For a PC with 1024 Mb RAM, I would suggest a datatbase allocation of 128000 and a toolpath allocation of 512000.

 

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Christian Raebild

Post processor developer for CIMCO Integration, the Danish Mastercam reseller.

[This message has been edited by craebild (edited 12-23-2000).]