VIRTUAL BELFRY

Home Page
The Program in Detail
System Requirements
Frequently Asked Questions
Orders and Updates
Registration
Support and Troubleshooting
What People Have Said
About the Bells
The Making Of...
Future Plans
Contact

List of Features
Towers, Sounds and Bells
Go and Stop
Speed of Ringing
About Methods
About Compositions
Composition Styles
About Call Changes
Viewing Rows
Ropes and Ropesight
Place Notation Display
Manual Control
Preferences
Version History

The Program in Detail

Version History

This page summarises the changes that have been made in the various versions of Virtual Belfry so far released.

Version 2.2

Version 2.2 differs from 2.1 in the following ways:

• Recordings of the bells of St. Paul's, Maryborough (Queensland) have been added as a new option (still using the Hobart bells for the animation on the screen).

• A bug relating to use of the "Go Again" option has been fixed.

Click here to download a patch to upgrade to the latest version from 2.0 or later.

Click here to order the latest version as a new disc (owners of versions prior to 2.0 must do this).

Version 2.1

Version 2.1 differed from 2.0 in the following ways:

• Recordings of the bells of St. Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide (the second heaviest eight in the world) have been added as a new option (still using the Hobart bells for the animation on the screen).
• After having chosen a rope for tapping or practising ropesight, you can reduce the volume of the other bells while keeping your own at the maximum, making it much easier to hear which bell is yours.

Version 2.0

Version 2.0 differed from version 1.4 in the following ways:

• Twelve Bells! All new photography has been taken of the (augmented) bells of St. David's Cathedral, Hobart, giving you a full twelve-bell tower. Video was used to capture the images this time around, and at a frame rate of 30fps the animation is much smoother than before. The original eight is still available, as are other options such as the bells tuned to the harmonic minor scale and configured to sound like Worcester Cathedral's harmonic minor ten.
• Methods, compositions and call-change sequences for cinques and maximus have, of course, been added to the program's lists.
• New, professional sound recordings have been added to the program, giving a much richer stereo sound (especially through headphones). The program has also been modified so that different recordings can be selected quickly and easily. This feature will grow over time as more recordings are taken and made available by free download (St. Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide, is likely to be the first addition, possibly by late November 2011).
• Another new sound option that has been included is of the notes of a piano (perfectly-struck changes on a piano sound surprisingly pleasant).
• Volume control. An independent volume control is provided so that the output level from the program can be controlled (and remembered between sessions).
• More bells = more images = more RAM. Check the system requirements for an update on the (still not excessive) RAM demands of Virtual Belfry.

Version 1.4

Version 1.4 differed from version 1.3a in the following ways:

• Ten Bells! As well as the original eight bells, you can now choose from two different ten-bell options: one a straightforward ten, the other a harmonic minor ten tuned and configured to sound like Worcester Cathedral's harmonic minor ten.
  Both ten-bell towers use the same photography as the original eight, with two of the bells cloned to bring the total up to ten. You can "see the join", but only if you look carefully!
• New methods and compositions for caters and royal have been added to the program's default stock. And a new style of composition is now supported - one that is used frequently for touches of Stedman Caters.
• The Moving Numbers window has been improved with some new display options, preservation of text proportions and the elimination of some confused graphics when the window is revealed mid-touch or after reverting to rounds.
• Rows generated during ringing can be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet or other external program. The rows are formatted so that when they are pasted into a spreadsheet the rows appear in a column by themselves - calls and changes of method are in separate columns.
• The letter 'c' (for opening the edit window of the composition or call change sequence that has just been rung) has been replaced by 'x' (for reasons not interesting enough to go into!).
• F9 and F10 have been implemented to augment the other function keys (F5 to F8), displaying menus of Caters and Royal methods.
• Two or three more options on the Preferences dialog have been changed so that they take effect as soon as OK is pressed (rather than having to stop the ringing before they take effect).
• A bug has been fixed that prevented My Rope from being selected from the belfry view before the ropes window had been displayed for the first time in a session. Another bug has been fixed that interfered with the correct interpretation of certain compositions of the Numbered Course style.

Version 1.3a

Version 1.3a differed from version 1.2 in the following ways:

• Half-muffled ringing can be selected as an option (sound only - the clappers appear unmuffled, unfortunately!).
• Methods or compositions can be rung whole-pull style (i.e. changes occur at the handstroke only). This is a good option to try in conjunction with the half-muffled sound.
• The ropes used to appear in a window of their own. While this is still an option, the default is now for the ropes, when shown, to replace the bells in the main window, so that the program shows either the bells or the ropes.
• A new ropesight game allows you to practise ropesight. If you're pointing at the correct rope when the flash occurs, you score a point. A "hit rate" bar shows how well you're doing as you go along, and some more detailed statistics are available at the end to compare your hunting up and hunting down hit rates.
• A new menu contains options relating to ropesight and the new scoring game;
• Call change sequences have been introduced, along with new menus, lists and edit windows to maintain them.
• The ropes are drawn a little fatter than they were before, making them stand out more clearly.
• Calls and changes of method appear as text in the centre of the ropes view.
• With the ropes in a separate window, the moving numbers display (if you are using it) now stays above the ropes at all times, rather than being obscured by them sometimes. (The same applies to the manual control window.)
• Several of the buttons on the toolbar lead to drop-down menus of options. The behaviour of these buttons when clicked has been changed to conform to the standard for such things.
• A bug has been fixed that caused the program to display an error message at startup ("Create Surface8 Failed") and then refuse to work. This has only ever affected a very small number of PCs.
• The timing of the ropesight flashes can be adjusted. Make them occur with no delay to guide your eye to the correct rope at the earliest opportunity and thus help develop your ropesight. Increase the delay when playing the ropesight game (see above) to give yourself time to point at the rope before the flash occurs.
• You can choose whether or not you want the program to remember that the ropes were on display when you last used the program and (if so) to display them again for you automatically when you next start the program.
• The menu option for displaying statistics after playing the ropesight game is disabled when there are no statistics available (which is the case at the start of any touch).
• A bug has been fixed that caused the program to crash when choosing "My Rope" from the belfry view when the ropes window had not yet been displayed.

Version 1.2

Version 1.2 differed from version 1.1b in the following ways:

• Aids to ropesight have been incorporated in the rope window. With one of the bells nominated as your own, flashes appear around the other ropes to highlight them when you would normally notice them during change ringing.
• The rope window now behaves like the main belfry window, accepting mouse clicks to raise and lower bells, make call changes and display the context menu. It also shows the 'tips' that reveal which rope is which.
• Ropes for lowered bells are shown in a faded-out style. They can be hidden during ringing (the default), or remain visible.
• The rope window now refreshes properly (instead of sometimes leaving traces of menus on it).
• The program must now be registered with the author before it will run.
• The ability to Silence a bell and sound it by tapping the space bar has been restricted to the rope window only (i.e. removed from the belfry window).
• Call change tips are now an option, revealing the call change that would be made by clicking on a given bell ("2 to 3", for example, when pointing at the 2nd in rounds and calling up).
• Changes to the pitch of the bells are capped at one octave above or below the default F# (in previous versions, holding an arrow key down would rapidly change the pitch far beyond what is sensible and sometimes being difficult to restore to a normal pitch afterwards).
• After ringing a composition (and with the bells set) you can now bring up the edit window for that composition by pressing 'c' on the keyboard.
• The default methods file has been modified to support bobs in Erin Doubles. The default compositions file has been modified to include two 120s that use those bobs, as defined in Standard 70. If you are upgrading an existing installation (by running the patch) and you want to incorporate these changes in your own set of methods and compositions, you will need to use the File..Restore Defaults option, or edit the files manually.

Version 1.1b

Version 1.1b differed from version 1.1a in the following ways:

• Function keys F1, F3 and F4 have been reconfigured to display Help, Full Screen and Ropes respectively.
• An option has been added to the File menu allowing you to restore the collection of methods and compositions to the originals supplied with the program.

Version 1.1a

Version 1.1a differed from version 1.1 in the following ways:

• The ropes window has been given an off-white background, and it now refreshes itself properly when the window is being resized and when the bells are not ringing.
• The ropes window can be opened or closed by pressing F1.

Version 1.1

Version 1.1 differed from version 1.0c in the following ways:

• The rope window has been introduced.
• Options on the Ringing menu have been re-grouped to improve useability.
• The setup process for "Full Installation" was not replacing the method and composition files as it should. In effect both installation options were the same: installing the method and composition files the first time, then leaving them untouched thereafter. This has been fixed (but may not be fixed for users who originally bought 1.0c and have upgraded to the later versions by downloading a patch).
• Dragging the moving numbers or the manual control window until the window was partially off the screen caused animation in those windows to cease. This has been fixed.
• In some cases, dragging or moving the windows could cause them to vanish altogether and be difficult to get back. This has been fixed.

Version 1.0c

Version 1.0c differed from version 1.0b in the following ways:

• A bug in the menus has been fixed that caused the program to display a particular method menu (say the doubles methods) regardless of which stage was requested.
• The status bar now includes a progress bar while images are being loaded. If a subset of the bells are raised and ringing is begun before loading has finished the bar will be hidden, but it will reappear once ringing stops and loading recommences.

Version 1.0b

Version 1.0b differed from version 1.0a (the first released version) in the following ways:

• The Moving Numbers window was preventing the main window from detecting keystrokes (such as 'b' for bob). This has been fixed. The Manual Control window has been altered similarly.
• It is now possible to raise and lower bells or issue call changes by typing the numbers of the appropriate bells using the keyboard.
• The '+' key can be used to call "go again".
• The tab key can be used to pause and resume ringing.
• The online help for keyboard shortcuts has been corrected (it used to claim that pressing the Enter key would start the bells ringing and perform other functions, whereas it is the space bar that does these things).
• The RAM limitation has been removed. Apart from computers with rock-bottom memory configurations for their particular version of Windows, Virtual Belfry should run. If memory is short, the images are scaled down appropriately when they are loaded from disc into RAM (so a very low memory configuration might result in some pixellation).
• A question mark can be typed to discover the amount of RAM scaling that has been applied to fit available memory. A value of 1.0 means no scaling was necessary and the images have been loaded at their full size. A value of 0.7 would mean that the width and height of all the images have been reduced to 70% of their actual values, implying that the available memory is approximately half that required for full-scale operation (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49).