The items listed below should be considered as ideas and options only. No definite plans will be committed to at this stage!

Twelve Bells

Now that the tower where Virtual Belfry was made has twelve ringable bells, repeating all the photography and modifying the program to support twelve bells is the obvious big leap forward. The fact that the tower is really a ten with two semitones is of no concern - the program can easily be made to produce the sound of a proper ring of twelve.

Along with the extra bells would come higher-resolution images, smoother animation, and perhaps improved sound recordings.

Achieving this, however, would be a major undertaking. More images per bell, and more bells, means a lot more work and it was bad enough the first time around! Success of the eight-bell version is the key factor that will provide the necessary encouragement to go ahead.

Different Bells

The folder structure for the current version has been chosen to support possible extension in the future to allow images of bells from other towers to be incorporated into the program. If the extension to twelve bells is made as described above, this extra ability may well be included at the same time. It may even be possible to allow others to add their own sets of images. I can foresee a novelty Christmas cartoon edition. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Anything is possible!

Improved Manual Control

Manual control of a bell using the mouse is difficult because of the absence of physical feedback. A solution to this problem is on the drawing board but is far from trivial. Watch this space!

Voice

Virtual Belfry has no voice calls at the moment. This could be remedied subject to demand.

Jump Changes

Support for jump changes would be fun, but the implications stretch from extending the place-notation conventions all the way to calculating a new set of forces for all the additional manoeuvres that the bells would be required to perform.