Those of you who are really old hands with PartyCAD may remember back in the early 90’s when it was called ROOMER. In 1997, when the package was rewritten for Windows, the name changed to PartyCAD 2000. Now, it’s the year 2001 and time for another name change. This year’s version is called PartyCAD ME. The ME stands for Millennium Edition, and PartyCAD ME is the best PartyCAD ever.
 

Furniture Album

   In previous versions of PartyCAD, a catalog at the back of the manual showed pictures of the available party furniture. With PartyCAD ME, a furniture album shows pictures of all of the party furniture right on your screen. Just click a picture and the piece is loaded into your design.

   All of the old catalog pieces are now in the album, and in addition, over 40 pieces of new or redesigned furniture have been added. These include Chavari chairs, new seating arrangements, electrical symbols, an exit sign, a fire extinguisher and parquet dance floors.

More Videos

   Last year we added 40 minutes of video instruction to PartyCAD. This was a popular feature, and so this year we have redone the old videos and added new ones, so now PartyCAD comes with 3 hours of video instruction. In addition to The Basics, there are videos on New Features, Stages and Dance Floors, Pipe and Drape, Making Landscapes, Making Furniture, Making Forms, Working with Digital Art and Becoming an Expert.

Enhanced Tent Wizard

   The Tent Wizard that was introduced last year allows you to quickly create frame, pole and clearspan tents and to easily add sidewalls to your creations. This year the Tent wizard has been improved to produce better looking tents, and enhanced to include a “Wire Top” option that makes it is easy to look down through the roof of your tents. The wizard now also allows for different center and side pole sizes.

Improved Landscapes

   Another new feature last year was the Virtual Reality module. This allows you to walk around in and take color snapshots of the parties that you create. This year the pictures are even better, since you can now draw roads and walks, lakes, gardens and other terrain features right on your plans, and these show in fairly realistic color as you walk about in your events.

Greater Capacity

   The way that we have always measured the capacity of PartyCAD has been to count the number of simple chairs that the program can render. Early DOS versions could handle about 300 chairs, and that was pretty good for way back when. Over the years the capacity has slowly improved until last year it reached 3000 chairs. This year, we did extensive work on the internals of the program and have increased the capacity of PartyCAD ME to more than 30,000 chairs on machines with sufficient memory. This means that you are not likely to run into a job that is too large for PartyCAD ME to handle.

Undo / Redo

   One of the longstanding shortcomings of PartyCAD has been the lack of an “undo” feature in the Furnish module. As part of the overhaul of internals mentioned above, an Undo button has been added to PartyCAD ME. This means that if you make a mistake, you need only click Undo to get rid of your error. Redo is also available — just in case you get too enthusiastic with the Undo button.

Select & Lock

   In PartyCAD ME, it is now easier than ever to select the piece you want to work with —– just click and drag on any piece, instead of having to double-click to select a new piece before dragging. This is more like other Windows programs, but was not allowed in PartyCAD 2000 because of the lack of an Undo capability.

   The most common reason for needing to “undo” is usually because you mistakenly move the wrong piece in a crowded arrangement. A Lock button now allows you to freeze a piece in place once you have finished adjusting its position. Locked pieces cannot be moved until you unlock them. This means that never again will you move the tent in which you are doing a design instead of that piece within the tent that you really intended to move.

Curved Chairs

   The Fill command has been around since 1998 and makes it very easy to fill a room or tent with chairs or round tables arranged in a particular fashion. In PartyCAD ME there are two new fill types – curved and wedge – that make it easy to design curved and circular seating patterns.

Layers

   Another nice new feature in PartyCAD ME is layers. You can now organize your furnishings onto 25 different layers — you might use one for electrical items, or maybe a couple of them for alternative seating arrangements. PartyCAD shows the different layers in different colors on the screen, or you can make a layer invisible. You can also tell PartyCAD that a particular layer is not selectable, and thus, though you can see the layer on the screen, you can never accidentally select and move the pieces that belong to that layer.

And More!

   What else is new in the Millennium Edition? 
 

Automatic Counts – the Furnish module now automatically reports the number of chairs and booths in your design as you work.  

Color Memory – the program can now remember your preferred colors for any piece of furniture.  

Automatic Labeling – in Layout Page you can now use semi-automatic labeling to easily number the booths in pipe and drape jobs.

   Finally, last year’s crop of bugs have been fixed, and many additional small changes have been made so that PartyCAD ME is now easier and more fun to use than ever before.