Bug#754277: Please update Sweet Home 3D packages to latest upstream version 4.4 (important improvements and bugfixes)

Wed Jul 9 12:11:05 UTC 2014

Package: sweethome3d
Version: 4.3+dfsg-1
Severity: wishlist

Please update Sweet Home 3D packages to latest upstream version 4.4 (released 
2014-06). Here are the most important changes:

http://sweethome3d.com/blog/2014/06/12/sweet_home_3d_4_4.html

New features in the texture pane
 The dialog box that lets you choose a texture for walls, floors, ceilings and
 materials was updated with a tooltip displaying the texture under the cursor
 at a larger size, a search text field to filter textures list, the ability to
 rotate textures and a list of the recently chosen textures.

Placing objects on furniture
 The furniture libraries 1.4 and the furniture coming by default with 
 SweetHome3D 4.4 include a new dropOnTopElevation (uneditable) property that 
 will help you place objects on furniture much faster.
 Imagine you want to decorate the table of the following desk with a computer
 and other objects. Until now, dropping an object on another one in the plan 
 set its elevation to a value equal to the height of the object. In the case 
 of this desk, some shelves and some other furniture, this led most of the 
 time to a disappointing situation where objects were too high.
Sweet Home 3D 4.4 comes also with the new Furniture > Reset elevation menu 
 item used to update the elevation of the selected objects according to the 
 furniture on which they are placed, like when you dropped them from the 
 catalog on some furniture in the plan. Imagine you dropped some plates on a
 table, and finally you replace the table by an other higher one. Until now,
 if you wanted to update the elevation of the plates, you had to reset their
 elevation to 0 then make a fake move of the plates to provoke an update of 
 their elevation.

Damaged files management
 In version 3.6, the ability to edit SH3D files damaged on the disk was removed
 to avoid the frustration of not being able to save them afterwards. As this
 choice implied that repairing a damaged file could be done only by program,
 I programmed a tool able to handle the most repairable cases. As this tool
 works well now, I integrated it in Sweet Home 3D 4.4 which tries to repair a
 damaged SH3D file when you open it.

Importing in the Online version
 Users who logged in the Online version are now able to import a SH3D file on sweethome3d.com server to edit it online.

Other features and important bug fixes in Sweet Home 3D 4.4:
 In the Furniture materials pane, the material selected in the materials list 
 now blinks in the 3D preview included in the pane to help you find the 
 material you want to edit.
 Sideways moves in the 3D view can me done with the Alt + left arrow and Alt +
 right arrow keys, eventually combined with the Shift key to move faster.
 For homes with multiple levels, the new Edit > Select all at all levels menu
 item will select all the items in all the levels of the home, to let you move
 them together or export them to OBJ format.
 The Select object sub menu shown in the contextual menu of the plan when you
 right-clicked on superimposed objects becomes the Toggle selection sub menu 
 when the Shift key is pressed, to let you remove hidden selected objects from
 selection or add unselected objects to selection.
 When the Foot/Inch/Fraction unit is selected in preferences (i.e. Imperial 
 unit system), the text fields used to edit lengths now show and accept lengths
 at this format, for example 1'11¼", and you may type decimals instead of the 
 fraction character.
 Sweet Home 3D Viewer introduced new parameters that will let you choose the 
 levels and points of view that the users will be able to select in the 
 contextual menu of the 3D view.

Some annoying bugs were also fixed in this release, among which:
 The bug that made some ugly black square dots appear from time to time in the
 photos computed at the two best quality levels should be fixed.
 Some users who used many different names for their objects, reported they
 couldn't save their preferences after a while and worse, that this saving was
 failing silently. This won't happen anymore.
 Collada / DAE format was replaced by KMZ format in Trimble Warehouse 3D a few
 months ago. As a KMZ file is actually a ZIP file which, among other things, 
 contains a Collada DAE file that Sweet Home 3D was already able to read, users
 just had to replace the KMZ extension by ZIP to make it work in SweetHome3D 4.3
 But this wasn't very handy and the KMZ extension is recognized by SweetHome3D 4.4

Btw, it seems you already updated sweethome3d-furniture* packages to 1.4 release:
http://www.sweethome3d.com/blog/2014/05/15/furniture_libraries_1_4.html
right?

Thanks for improving free software,
 Mantas

-- 
Labanaktis/Good luck,
Mantas Kriaučiūnas	 Jabber ID: mantas at akl.lt 	 GPG ID: 43535BD5
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