Change log

4th August 2013 07:55 - note to self: its diameter NOT radius you idiot. Changed label in torus control panel.

10th February 2013 09:10 - Torus can now be rotated so it 'stands up' rather than 'lies flat'. Fixed bugs when printing non symmetrical models such as an ellipsoid where width is less than depth.

3rd February 2013 16:20 - New torus (aka doughnut) model. Fixed % on progress bar when first shown.

28th January 2013 18:30 - New Ellipsoid model. Zoom increased to 4x to help with larger models. Ruler and curve block count (only for symmetrical models) added in 2D mode. Lighthouse now has quadrant guides.

15th December 2012 9:00 - Slider bar and buttons to move through layers.

1st December 2012 8:50 - Season's Greetings. New snowman model!

3rd November 2012 7:50 - New intro. Fixed bug where Wizard Tower model would crash if bottom floor diameter exceeded the width of the floor with the side tower.

3rd July 2011 09:40 - 2D view, ellipses and new lighthouse model. Improved UI. Code restructure.

17th June 2011 21:13 - even better renderer, 128 size spheres, pan/zoom, circles. A big update. The render is approximately 10x faster and that's for creating print previews too. With a faster renderer I've increased sphere and general object size to 128 blocks. Bigger objects use smaller cubes so I've included a 2x zoom and pan. Objects appear from popup menu so I've room to add more objects in the future.

5th June 2011 14:10 - New renderer. I've swapped lots of isometric cube objects for drawing them myself resulting in a renderer that is approximately double the speed of the old one.

22nd May 2011 16:13 - Wizard Tower model. Plotz can now model Wizard towers. The UI has been updated and you can now switch between sphere, observatory and wizard tower models. As well as specifying the diameter and number of floors in your wizard tower you can also set to add a side tower and specify its height also. Changes have been made to printed schematics including removal of 'block with block below' and the addition of 'tower wall' and 'tower roof'.

1st May 2011 09:25 - Observatory model. Plotz can now model an observatory based on the sphere of your chosen size. The observatory model is based on the Palomar Observatory. Also removed maximise/minimise isometric view button. Its always maximised now. Removed lighting from isometric view blocks and slightly changed the cube graphic shading and view background colour.

20th April 2011 19:37 - Various changes. White background for windows makes the model stand out better. The render has changed so I can do more with it in the future versions but no visible on-screen changes. Sorry because there were still some extra blocks in the last version (see 7th April below). Now eliminated by better calculations rather than cleaning up afterwards.

14th April 2011 21:05 - Various changes. Plotz always comes in with the isometric view maximised. In case users might miss the control panel, its now situated at the top of the screen. The total number of blocks required is displayed on screen and in printouts the size of the sphere and total number of blocks required to build it are displayed at the top of each page. The fill/hollow button has gone and spheres are always hollow. To build a filled sphere from a hollow schematic is a no brainer.

7th April 2011 18:58 - Eliminated extra blocks, put legend on printout.. Previously on larger spheres there were some extra blocks not needed on the inside. Ideally, removing any block from the finished hollow sphere should show through to the outside world. This is now the case after adding an algorithm to remove unnecessary blocks from the inside. Additionally I've added a legend on the printout to show which blocks are which in the schematic.

27 March 2011 11:50 - Made the top layer highlight when stepping through layers. Not everyone has a printer and when stepping through layers I've noticed its hard to see one layer of blocks over the previous. I've made the top layer highlight with yellow blocks making it clearly visible helping those users building one layer at a time from the display on screen.

27 March 2011 11:00 - Dark gray blocks added to show overlaps in schematics. My voxel sphere algorthm isn't perfect and some blocks from one horizontal layer may overlap the previous. This isn't a big problem and if you build a sphere to the schematic it will still look great (the overlaps are on the inside). It can however be confusing when building from the schematic printout so I've made the overlaps show as dark gray blocks.