Is there a way to define the floors by elevation only?
The silly way Floor Manager works is based on having to define a floor elevation from the bottom AND a Floor-to-Floor height. This creates a dependency chain that starts at the bottom.
The lowest floor elevation is the root input parameter, followed by the first Floor-to-Floor height, which generates the second floor elevation, which not adjustable being a derived value. The third floor elevation is then generated by the second floor level (non-adjuatable) plus a Floor-to-Floor height and so on. This creates a totally inflexible and unworkable dependency chain.
The overly simple logic makes it pretty much a nightmare to use on even very simple projects. Especially problematic: refurbishment and complex infrastructure projects, where floor levels DO NOT follow regular Floor-to-Floor heights; and you are constantly having to insert new floor levels.
I think that there needs to be a way to define whether the floor level parameters are input parameters or derived parameters. Maybe, this can be defined using the right click menu.
The same should apply to each Floor-to-Floor height cell.The user will need to define whether the F2F value is a 'fixed' parameter or simply derived from looking at the adjacent floor levels in the stack.
This should allow the Floor Manager to keep the 'stack' of dependencies in a logical order.
Say you have an user-inputted Floor level (fixed) with a user-inputted F2F value (fixed), this would bump all the levels in the floor stack up or down.
Now, if say one of the floors above has a fixed elevation, Floor Manager would treat it as invariant and derive the first F2F unfixed/parametrised value. If it finds that all the F2F values between the modified level and the fixed level are fixed then it would ask the user to 'relax' one of the floor elevation or F2F values.
By using the right click function to selectively lock values in the floor stack, the user would be able to make the adjustments without the floor levels cascading out of control which is what happens with the current FM logic, which has no capacity to selectively constrain the 'spreadsheet'.
The Floor Manager is pretty key for minimising drafting errors especially in today's environment where most Aecosim users will not have much prior experience or training.
Even with new build, what you will find is that the basement and roof levels, where all the plant is, has all kinds of ad hoc levels where deriving floor levels by F2F levels makes no sense. Not letting the user define levels individually without reference to F2F levels is a huge stumbling block. If having some rules-based smarts is too difficult, then there should an option to dumb the system down so that all Floor elevations would be input values and all the F2F values derived. I would also ask that the table to selectable as an OLE object and allow the user to copy/paste to Excel.
Please fix.