Roof Live Loads vs. Snow Loads RAM SS

Can I just throw in my vote for that being a good priority? Especially after this long? I know I was really surprised 5 years ago when I first started using RAM to find that it couldn't handle as complex of load cases as the in-house joist design software at my previous company. It allowed snow, roof live, uplift, and just about anything else we could dream up to be run concurrently and the governing combination picked for a design summary similar to when you click View Results on a beam in RAM SS. This has always seemed like a surprisingly basic limitation on what's otherwise a workhorse of a program that does all of our floor designs well, but leaves a bad aftertaste on every roof design that we have to run twice to check roof live OR base snow with drifts.

Thanks for the comments guys. I agree it can be one of those unwelcome surprises when you have the wrong setting, and it can be overly conservative in other cases. The hard part is that Ram Steel needs to be enhanced to handle multiple combinations where it currently only deals with hard coded combinations (e.g. 1.4 Dead or 1.2 Dead and 1.6 (all) Live) and that is a bigger task to overhaul than it seems. I did flag the official enhancement request to reference this post FWIW.

Thanks for the comments guys. I agree it can be one of those unwelcome surprises when you have the wrong setting, and it can be overly conservative in other cases. The hard part is that Ram Steel needs to be enhanced to handle multiple combinations where it currently only deals with hard coded combinations (e.g. 1.4 Dead or 1.2 Dead and 1.6 (all) Live) and that is a bigger task to overhaul than it seems. I did flag the official enhancement request to reference this post FWIW.

Ah, yes, I can see that being an issue. At that previous company, we set up the program from the beginning with a very open structure for load factor variables and combinations, so that we could easily add new load combinations with different factors for revised building codes, and save custom combinations for oddball cases or testing. I've done some peer review since then for colleagues at another company that had load factors hard-coded, and the switch from ASCE7-05 wind to ASCE 7-10 was particularly frustrating as they had to scale their input loads to get IBC 2012 results with IBC 2006 factors until they got their software updated. Good luck.