COMPASS has hundreds of powerful features, including a configurable survey editor, high speed real-time 3D passage wall modeling, GIS and data base compatibility, sophisticated loop closure and blunder detection. COMPASS is extremely fast capable of animating of caves in excess of 150 miles in length. It is also very easy to use, with built-in wizards and tools that make it easy for novice users to manage and work with large cave systems. COMPASS will run on any modern version of Windows. COMPASS is constantly being refined to add new features and take advantage of the latest technologies.
This is a major new release, with more than 45 changes and improvements. Here are the highlights of
the changes:
1. TRUE 3D ROSE DIAGRAMS.
CaveX now has the ability to generate 3D Rose-Depth diagrams where each petal is a 3D object that represents both angle and depth at the same time. These are full 3D solid models that can panned, rotated and zoomed allowing them to be viewed from any angle. 3D Rose Diagrams are much more useful than ordinary Rose Diagrams because they allow you to see passage trends that only exist at certain depths in the cave.
2. LOCKING IMAGES TO THE CAVE.
The Viewer now supports the option of locking bitmap images to the cave. This is useful for tying topographic maps, aerial photographs and other maps or drawings to the cave. Once the image has been registered, the image can expand, contract, shift and rotate synchronously with cave. There is also the option of editing, trimming, and resizing images using filtering and over-sampling to minimize artifacts. Finally, you can adjust the contrast, brightness and gamma of the image to improve its clarity and readability.
3. DISTANCE COLORING.
The Viewer now has the ability to color the cave according to the distance from the user's view point. By using a gradient of 23 colors, the program creates illusion of 3D passages without the need for special glasses. The option includes a white-black color scheme for black screens, a black-white scheme for white screens or printing and a red-blue scheme for enhanced 3D. This works because blue has a shorter wave length than red and your eye is forced to focus farther away, which tricks the brain into seeing 3D. Near passages can also be drawn thicker to enhance the effect. You can even create your own custom color
schemes. The display is also "Depth-Sorted" so the near passages appear on top of far away passages, no matter what the original survey order was.
4. VISUAL STATION IDENTIFICATION/EDITING.
The Viewer now has a right-click context menu that allows you to quickly identify stations and edit surveys. You just right click on a point in the cave and the program will highlight the nears station and survey and display the name of the nearest station along with a list of other stations in the survey. You can also right click on a survey to instantly edit that survey.
5. COMPLEX PLOTTING.
The Complex Plotting options have been improved so that they are more symmetrical and consistent.
This means that more options can be combined to control precisely how each survey is displayed. Surveys and Sections can be selectively and independently Displayed, Colored, Marked, Displayed, Excluded, Labeled, Colored By Depth, and 2D/3D Modeled.
NEW MAGNETIC MODELS. The magnetic models for calculating declination have been updated with latest IAGA data. This means that Compass can now generate magnetic declinations from 1900 through 2010.
3D PASSAGE MODELING. The Viewer now supports hiding passage walls that face away from the screen. The feature works with the 3D-polygon passage models and it makes the display less cluttered and easier to see the 3D aspects of the passages. (Note: CaveX has always supported this feature.)
GENERAL PURPOSE EXPORT. There is now a general purpose export feature that allows you to selectively export lists of stations, coordinates and shot information. The feature allows you to selectively export From/To station names, X, Y, Z locations and shot measurements. The fields can be comma-delimited or tab-delimited, making the export compatible with most common spreadsheets and databases.
USABILITY FEATURES. There are literally dozens of usability improvements:
A. IMAGES. There is now generalized support for reading and writing BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and JPG images. There is improved GeoTiff support, including the ability to create GeoTiff files from ordinary bitmaps and add geographic coordinate information. Images can be edited, trimmed, resized, and rotated using special algorithms that filter and over sample to minimize distortion. Images can also be adjusted for
brightness, contrast and gamma to improve the quality.
B. GEOGRAPHY. There is improved handling for UTM/Long/Lat, Declination, and Convergence, with improved accuracy, and easier data entry. Support for the Molondensky transform has been added for more accurate conversion between Datums.
C. VIEWER INTERFACE. There are lot of improvements to the Viewer interface including smoother zooming, scroll bars for more control when the window is minimized and a 3D rotation tool on the tool bar.
D. GENERAL. There are lots of general improvements including more options for configuring and saving default directories, Datums and units, Improved readability for large numbers by showing thousands separators in the numbers, and more dialog boxes that can be expanded to full screen so that more data
can be viewed at one time. All programs now show the name of the file open on the Windows Task Bar, making it easier work with multiple copies of Compass running working on different caves. There are also improved options for searching through station names, comments and survey team information. There is more comprehensive statistics information including Purged Stations, Included/Excluded Shots and Length. There is better support for wheel-mice, scaling for meta files and additional popup menus for various windows gives easier access to commands. Finally, Azimuth, Length and Inclination are included with the blunder information to make it easier to identify likely candidates.
HOW TO GET COMPASS. COMPASS is a shareware product, which means that you can try it out for free. If you like it, you pay a nominal registration fee of $25. There is also a CD-ROM package that includes registration for all programs and more than 400-megabytes of supplemental programs, tools and data. The CD is $50 for individual user, which is a saving of $36.