Robert Inventor

Bug Fixes

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August 16th 2009

If user has accented letter in the user name, and capitalise names is switched on, you may get an access violation when you try to unlock the program - fixed.

When you click to change between Change Stalks, Move, Hide this and Change Branches in the virtual flower pictures, if you click near the edge of one of the words rather than dead centre, you may get the effect of the next or previous word e.g. click on move a bit to the left of the centre of the word, and it may change to Change Stalks - fixed.

Some other very minor fixes.

April 16th 2008

Help | Intro - broken link - doesn't show the help - fixed

A couple of other very minor fixes.

9 PM Thursday, March 20, 2008 GMT - Release of Virtual Flower 2.1

Bug fixes - when you print the shape, the position on the printed page (as shown in the page setup dialog too) isn't the same as the position in the window. That's because the position was set using pixel units instead of the position relative to the size of the window. Fixed - with a check box for backwards compatibility.

Some of the shapes had missing faces too when printed at the highest quality settings or got clipped to the right - fixed.

Many minor bug fixes too numerous to mention individually

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January 2008

Several very minor bug fixes. Option to add a new leaf shape in the Leaves window wasn't working quite - fixed. When the number of layers is set to 0 and add leaves etc is switched off, nothing left to show - now alerts user to the situation with a message, and prevents this combination from being selected. The option to make shapes from the vertex face numbers would get confused if you made a shape with star polygons, then another one without - cleared up when you restart the program - now fixed.

2nd December 2003

If you click and drag to change the shape of the tree using right mouse button to zoom in or out and drag beyond the top of the window then it zooms the smallest branches down to 0 size. Similarly strange effects when dragging angles around if mouse goes outside the window to top. Fixed.

11th November

Program may be very slow in Windows XP. To fix this a new check box has been added: Picture | Drawing Options | Use check Peek and Sleep. This is now unchecked as the preset in all operating systems except Win95 and Win 98. Not sure why it should make it slow in XP and will investigate further later, meanwhile this is a workaround. You may find that the program is slow with it checked and fast with it unchecked - fixed for now.

If you have it set to open all the images in another program and then save an animation, all the animation frames get opened in it too. Not normally what one wants probably - so now there are separate check boxes for the animation frames, for the thumbnails, and so on - fixed.

7th September

When you resize the tool tips extra help window, the text stays within the rectangle of the old text field size - fixed.

Note - it is now a Rich Edit 2.0 window - requires RichEd20.dll. All operating systems except Win 95 have this dll. It is compatible with Win 95 too and many programs install it already - not included in the installer as it would add a little to the size, is easily installed and most users will have it already.

The tool tip for the main picture doesn't show up first time you run the program after you first install it, only on the second run of it - fixed.

6th September

Fixes a bug in the tool tips that can cause a fluttering hourglass when a window is first shown and another one that can cause access violations for users with Windows 98 + Explorer 5.x. See the Fractal Tune Smithy Bug Fixes page for 5th Sept. for details.

18th July

When you go to File | Open then it is preset to show VRML Output files (*.wrl) there. Should show Virtual Flower files (*.vfl).

VF can read the .wrl files it makes itself, since the necessary information to remake the flower is included at the end as a comment - but can't read VRML files generally. So for instance, it can't open its viewpoint files, or the scenes - these are intended to be included as part of the VRML output only.

Note Whenever you save one of the virtual flowers it gets saved as both a .wrl and a .vfl file. So you never need to open the .wrl files in most circumstances. You might need to open them here if you had a WRL file which was made in Virtual Flower and with no .vfl file accompanying it - e.g. one which a friend sent to you by e-mail or whatever. It's because of that possibility that there is a VRML Output file type in the Open dialog.

If you go to Output | Viewpoints then you get a handled exception when you first see the window. If you click Yes you can contiue working in VF and it happens once only. It might have happened in other circumstances too. This bug got introduced recently as a result of the speed up of the depth order and split poly drawing options - fixed.

10th July

Well lots of minor bug fixes this time. The coloured anaglyphs were only really working for wireframe before and now they can be used with solid shaded shapes too. Various bugs in the anaglyphs fixed.

The next bug shows up if you show your shape in a stereoscopic view and also with split polygons as in quality level 5 - which you need for intersecting shapes such as many of the various geometrical figures. Only the left-most image of the pair is shown complete - fixed.

When you close the program and start it up again then it didn't remember whether last time you were showing the image to turn around, or to change its shape. Now it does.

Quite a few others - I can't remember them all now and didn't note them all down as I fixed them. If you encountered some mystery bugs you may find this upload fixes them - if not be sure to let me know!

4th June

When you exit the program when in the middle of compressing or remaking all the files in a folder, a message pops up to say that you are in the middle of resaving files, and asks if you want to exit or not - but if you say no it exits anyway - fixed.

2nd June

When using VF on older machines you may notice the hourglass flutter for a while before a new window appears - with a fast machine this happens so quickly as to be barely noticeable. Fixed - well got it down to one flutter or so. It is caused by VF adding tool tips to the window.

23rd April

The tool tips may show an hour glass briefly just before they are shown - fixed.

May be slow to respond to keyboard or mouse when in the middle of refreshing the picture of a complex flower. Also cpu usage may be high at this point - fixed by inserting short sleeps every so often during the refresh, and in the sleeps, actively checks to see if there are any messages to be processed, and processes them if so - this is faster than just waiting to see if they get received by the main message loop in the program during the sleeps.

31st March

File | Save As | Files of type | Ini files -saves it in gzipped format - and if you open the file saved in this way, get an error message because it doesn't expect these files to be gzipped - fixed - now it saves them uncompressed, and if they are gzipped already, can open them.

Bug in the star sphere construction - not getting all the angles as intended in the release (only in the debug version of VF :-( ) - fixed.

26th March

Task bar doesn't show the Virtual Flower icon when it is running - fixed.

Last upload had a Wizard menu entry for the "Baby star sphere wizard" which isn't quite ready yet - so removed it. (Will be ready soon, also a Hyper wizard for the tesseracts and simplex).

In the fifth screen of the easy flowering tree wizard, the drop list of scenes and viewpoints are blank - fixed.

25th March,

In freeware mode - message during the automatic extracting of the VRML files during setup about need to reduce number of stalks to 24 for the star spheres in the freeware mode - not supposed to happen here, only when you save them later yourself after making changes - fixed.

7th March

If you do File | New followed by File | Save, best to pop  up the Save As box to let you  change the file name at that point, and not doing that - fixed.

When VF first starts up on some systems, stack overflow occurs and you need to reboot (sorry!) - fixed.

28th February

An exception can sometimes occur when the flowers etc are shown in Virtual Flower - fixed.

23rd February

Tool tips not showing in Win 2K - fixed.

File | Virtual Flower Files | Remake all from backups - is very slow - it was remaking the drop list of files in this dialog after each file saved - fixed.

6th February

Menu back to front in Win 2K. -fixed.

Shows hypercube as first thing you see after install instead of the default tree - fixed.

On close and re-open one of the windows, the size is wrong (too high and narrow, or resized to zero height). Also doesn't record the position of the main window from one session to the next - fixed.

Star sphere sometimes made with one flower different in shape from all the others - fixed

Sheet flowers - order of the points sometimes confused when you close and re-open it - looks the same but when you try to change the shape it re-connects with the lines crossing - fixed

Sometimes doesn't show polygons correctly when they intersect with each other at the highest quality setting - fixed

Save and show - in some computer setups, can't find the app. associated with .wrl files - fixed.

19th December

Use of Colour Wheel | Duplicate remves the last colour in the list of colours - fixed.

16th November

File | Virtual Flower Files | Remake all from backups not working - fixed

10th November

If you browse for a folder in Output | Audio, then the drop list of clips doesn't change to show the ones in the new folder - fixed.

Also the drop list only shows midi and .wav clips - and not the .au and .mp3 types supported by some VRML browsers (Cortona for both, and .au as the java sound format for use with Blaxxun) - fixed.

Also if you type a new file name into the edit field, rather than select it from the drop list, that doesn't change the audio clip for the node - fixed.

3rd November. Triangulation of the scottish bluebell VRML file not done properly - this could affect other models too with triangulated petals - fixed.

28th October

When you use Colours | Colour Wheel | Click on patch , then Ctrl + Insert to change the brightness, the picture gets erased (because of the Ctrl key shortcut to halt rendering). Fixed.

27th October

Various bug fixes related to the layout of the windows. E.g. in Colours | Colours | Specular colours, when you select / unselect it, only one of the colour bars got refreshed - fixed. That sort of thing.

25th October

If you have installed VF already and then try to show one of the tabbed dialogs for say the Shape menu you get asked if you want to reset to the defaults.

However, if you choose File | Reset, this also resets to the defaults. One doesn't watn that as there is already a reset button in Help | Organise Tabbed Dialogs - so now File | Reset only resets the tabbed dialogs if you have an old version of FTS and haven't changd the default tabbed dialog that came with it originally - fixed.

23rd October

Asymmetrical leaves for the Sunflowers example file - fixed.

18th October

Handled exception on show File | Tabbed Dialog | Organise - fixed.

20th September afternoon

Flowers Etc | Objects | 2 line colours - some of the lines in the first colour get shown as the second colour (actually, saved in both colours simultaneously) when saved to VRML - fixed.

Can't highlight a selection in the help window to copy to the clipboard - fixed..

20th September

Scottish bluebells - the flower petals were flat rather than curved This was a bug in the option to curve petals using the formula (rescaled) for Flowers Etc | Petal Curve | Click and drag points - fixed.

If you select a viewpoints file from the drop list of viewpoint files to add, then save the file, get message that the viewpoints file can't be found. Reason was that the .wrl extensino was no longer getting added automatically - fixed.

18th September

The context sensitive Ctrl + C - where if you have focus set to the picture, for instance, it copies the bitmap, and if set to Viewpoints window, copies the viewpoint etc - had the side effect that the normal Ctrl + C for edit fields no longer had intended effect - e.g highlight text in viewpoint window and use ctrl c and you still copy the viewpoint instead of the text. Fixed by disabling it when focus is set to an edit field - so you still have context sensitive Ctrl + C and also have the normal copy and paste of text in edit fields - fixed.

14th September

Freebie version remakes the vrml files with only two layers after the install - fixed.

Angles of trees getting changed after saving file, then re-opening - fixed.

A few things not getting saved, e.g. whether or not one has hyper-perspective selected for the tesseracts - fixed.

If you have a virtual flowre file saved in some other folder, exit from VF, start another session and immediately resave it, then it gets saved into the install folder - fixed.

Made it so that it will re-make all the .wrl files (unless resaved since the install) to fix bugs in these.

13th September

With the new higher dimensinoal shapes, the geodesic sphere option moves the points of the 3D projections out to the sphere. I suppose that is interesting in its way but the true hyper-geodesic sphere would be made by moving the points of the original higher dimensional shapes out to the surface of the hypersphere first - then one would make a new 3D projection of the result. This could be done, but would need more coding. So for now, just removed the option to do geodic subdivisions of faces of polytopes of more than three dimensions.

Exotic Desert Flowers - doesn't show the flowers for this one correctly, just a jumble of shapes. Fixed this, and also the thing that gave rise to it - happens when this file is created anew during the install.

12th September

The simplex wasn't regular - all the triangles should have been equilateral and they weren't - fixed.

9th September

Daisy red tipped red tip to petal not symmetrical.

Added Flowers Etc | 3D Flowers Etc | 3D shapes to make | Reflect right over to left and used it to repair this - and left it in as it may occasionally be useful for other things - fixed.

7th September

When Virtual flowers next runs it will update some of the .VRML files - some of the animations got cut short, but the most significant thing is that in the very first upload the berries .wrl file got saved with viewpoints, and when this gets inlined into the rowan tree, then it ends up with hundreds of viewpoints, several for each cluster of berries on the tree. That wouldn't matter particularly, but in Windows 9X anyway, the browser can stop responding while it tries to inline all those viewpoints. This is particuarly important if you use it with the screen saver, because if the screen saver stops responding you can't get back to your work (though the music continues to play merrily in the background). Oh dear :-(.

So if you downloaded the first release, you'll get a message asking if it is okay to do this when you next start Virtual flower. Unfotunately VF can't do it automatically because when making the .WRL files it also remade the .VFL files, which therefore removes any trace of the original file date - so it can't detect whether or not the new ones are more recent than the ones you already have. In future it will be able to do this okay.

If you downloaded the 5th of september one then you are okay for the berries viewpoints, but will still get the message because that version of VF still remade the VF files - so it can't tell whether it is okay to update the files with the animations cut short. This includes for instance the honeycomb sphere, which never gets a chance to reach its full size and position, several others too, such as the tropical island one.

Jewel Trees - saved with no animations - fixed.

When you change the petal curve shape from cone to parabola or the like, cell patttern changes to triangulate - when you go bac kto one it remains that way. Better to go back to radial which is more efficient and usually suitable for cone shaped petals fixed.

6th September

Flowers etc | y trans not getting reset - effect was, depending on which ones you opened before in VF, you could see the daffodils with the petals displaced upwards - fixed.

5th September

Berries.wrl got saved with viewpoints - meant viewpoints got added multiple times to the rowan tree!! - fixed.

Field of daffodils got saved with the random angle set to only 5 degrees - fixed.

Flowers Etc | Petals - Scroll bar doesn't let you change the petal shape number - fixed.

Some of the example virtual flower animations had got saved with the cycle length set to 12 where it originaly was 43 - meant that the animation stopped before the flower had finished growing - fixed.

File | Reset was intended to reset the way all the angles are shown to degrees, but was resetting them to radians instead - fixed.

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