[LDPartEditor] 0.8.27 Beta Released (Merge+Split, Unrectifier, edge dir., bug fixes)

[Nils Schmidt]

Hello,

I would like to use the last day of this year to publish a new version of LDPE
...and I thank you very much for this award! Its my pleasure to play around with LDraw and to develop highly useful tools for
the community. I am an agile software developer. I am a big fan of extreme programming, kanban and kaizen.
LDPC and LDPE are perpetual beta versions. They will stay at the development stage for an indefinite period of time.


As always, you can download LDPE from this page:
http://nilsschmidt1337.github.io/ldparteditor/

Changelog:
(3 new features and 7 bug fixes)

With this release you will be able to...

• ...choose whether or not "Merge to Nearest Edge" splits the edge on merged vertices.
  
• ...limit unrectifier to only inline rect primitives (hold Ctrl and press the unrectifier button).
  
• ...adjust the direction of the manipulator to the direction of an edge. I changed the behavior of "Move Manipulator to the Nearest Edge"!
  

The following critical issues were fixed:

1. Fixed an endless loop on the first start (affected 0.8.26 only).
   
2. Rectifier added the same edge line into two adjacent rectangle primitives.
   
3. Toggle comment / TEXMAP didn't adjust the text selection.
   
4. The new render engine is now optional. Its automatic hardware detection was broken.
   
5. When you inserted a protractor, the order of the vertex triplet was not deterministic.
   
6. Unrectifier inserted an extraneous empty lines where rects were previously.
   
7. The quick fix of "invalid use of 'BFC INVERTNEXT' / Flat subfile" only removed the BFC INVERTNEXT statement. It should also invert the direction of the flat subfile in flat direction to keep the same BFC winding.
   

What will the next release 0.8.28 deliver? Bug fixes, more header validation features, usability improvements...

---

The program was tested intensively with "real world" files.
However, it is still a beta version and something can go wrong in about 100.000 lines of code.

Make sure that you choose the right architecture for your OS and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) (64bit or 32bit).
A short guide how to check if a 64bit JVM is installed on your system is located at the bottom of this message.

1. Download the zip-Archive
   
2. Extract the archive content to the location of your choice
   
3. On windows, double-click "run.bat" to start LDPE.
   
4. On linux, you have to excecute the shell script "run.sh" to start LDPE.
   

Please note that this software is in the beta stage. Although, LDPE 0.8.27 was tested, there are already known issues  for this release. There is a potential risk of data loss.

You can search for updates if you do the following steps:

1. On windows, double-click "update.bat" to search for updates.
   
2. On linux, you have to excecute the shell script "update.sh".
   

I listen carefully to your requests and possible complaints. Please leave me a message, with your thoughts and wishes to further improve the software.

LDPE is a 3D CAD application: The overall system requirements are higher. While I recommend to use a powerful 64-bit multicore system, it could be possible, to run LDPE on older machines as well.

System Requirements:


Minimum System Requirements:

• 64-bit Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.8
  
• OpenGL 2.1 compatible Graphics Card
  
• Operating System (64-bit): Windows [7 or newer], Linux [e.g. Ubuntu Linux >=14.4]
  
• CPU: Multicore-Processor e.g. Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon II (>2.0Ghz)
  
• RAM: 4GB
  
• Video-Memory: 1 GB
  
• Free Disk Space: 100 MB
  

Recommended Requirements:

• Operating System (64bit): Windows 7,8,10, Linux [e.g. Ubuntu Linux >=14.4]
  
• OpenGL 3.3 compatible Graphics Card
  
• CPU: Multicore-Processor with 4 cores (or more)
  
• RAM: >4 GB
  
• Video-Memory: >1 GB
  
• Free Disk Space: 512 MB
  
• For a faster start, LDPartEditor and the LDraw™ library should be installed on a SSD.
  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to check your JVM version (32- or 64-bit):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can try on the command line:

Code:

java -d64 version

If it's not a 64-bit version, you'll get a message that looks like:
This Java instance does not support a 64-bit JVM. Please install the desired version.