BugAnnoyer

I have Home Designer Suite 2025 and either one or two problems, not sure. When I open HDS, I see the following sequence of messages, responses, errors, responses:

Message box:

Do you want to download available Home Designer Core Catalogs to your Library?
You can continue to use Home Designer while downloading

I respond "Yes". Next I get the error message box:

The catalog download/update completed with one or more errors. This could be caused by internet connectivity, firewall settings, etc. Would you like to try downloading again?
I respond "Yes", and get the same error. Next, I choose "Check Knowledge Base", and I've tried the various troubleshooting steps there, including manually downloading the Home Designer Suite files to the correct location. None of these troubleshooting steps has changed the Message or Error messages on startup.

In the Database Libraries\errors.log, I see the following error (corresponding to each time I go through the above sequence):
Failed to Download Core Library Index File: HD_Suite_Core_Content_Index.txt, Reason: 0

This file does not exist, and I do not see that file as one of the ones I can download. I've also poke around in the Libraries menu on HDS and none of the things available there has changed the error. One of the things I also noticed is that all the catalog_hash.txt files in every sub-directory of ProgramData are empty

Another error (and probably a separate error?) is that when I open an old Plan file (from HDS 2015), and then open a camera View in the designer, I get a lot of missing file errors:

"One or more files referenced by this view could not be found"
When I look for those files, they were present in the old 2015 folders. I copy them from those 2015 folders to the corresponding 2025 folders, but that does not change that error message the next time I open that Plan/View.

I've searched the forum and Googled on these problems, but so far have not found any answers.

Thanks for any help you can give!

--Steve

I found what I was doing wrong, have a workaround to my problem (see previous post "Object Not Compatible") and figured out a couple of things about Home Designer / Create Plant Image, and also about the image software I was using (Irfanview). First, Create Plant Image wants to use the Alpha Channel option for PNG transparency, and apparently can't use transparency based on a particular color in the PNG palette. Secondly, I had been opening the files in the Referenced Files .zips using Irfanview (so I could view before saving), and then saving from there using Save As. Apparently, Irfanview has some kind of limitation or bug when handling Alpha Channel transparencies, and that's why I was getting a "ghost" Camellia when doing that. When I simply copied from the .zip file to a temporary location, and then used that file to do Create Plant Image, everything worked as expected.

I answered my own question, or rather I found a workaround (it still seems like some kind of bug that an object shipped with the product would be "Not Compatible"). See the other post I put just after this one "Create Plant Image".

This is related to the other post I put today "Object Not Compatible". I noticed that I could browse the .zip in the Reference Files folder, and it contained the .PNG image of the Camellia bush I was trying to use in Plant Chooser. So resourceful me, I figured, I'll just save this and then use it in Create Plant Image to create it manually. However, Create Plant Image doesn't seem to pay attention to the Transparency information in the saved .PNG. Well, that's not entirely true. When you use the defaults where the .PNG has the transparency saved as a particular color in the palette, then it doesn't pay attention and you see it as a solid (in this case) black. If you use the option to save the transparency as the Alpha Channel, then transparency works in Create Plant Image, but then the image itself shows as a sort of ghost, and not solid. Any others having luck with Create Plant Image where you are using your own images?

I'm trying to select a Camellia in Plant Choser which came from the Core Catalogs in Home Designer Suite 2015. I've tried Update Library Catalogs, but no change. The image has a grey watermark stating "Object Not Compatible" and cannot be selected in Plant Chooser. Any suggestions?