HeightSmith

Changes

0.5.1

Equal window size, in the Projection block of Window Lights. Anything a generator draws sits inside a cell and fills a fixed share of it, so on a disc it inherits that cell's shape - pinched near the hub, stretched at the rim. For a panel that is right, because the panel is its cell. For a window it is not: a window on a hull is the same window wherever it sits, and flat is the projection that gets that right.
With the switch on, every window is drawn at one size over the whole disc. Rings too narrow to hold a whole one are left out rather than given a squeezed one, which would touch its neighbours and turn the ring into a solid band - and a real hull has no windows that close to its middle either. Raise the hub radius or lower the window size to bring them back.

0.5.0

The polar projection. Thirteen of the hard-surface layers can now be wrapped round a centre: rings and sectors instead of a square grid. Greeble Panels becomes saucer plating, Bars & Slats becomes spokes, Knurling becomes the top of a knob. The switch sits in a new Projection block at the top of the layer card, and only on layers where the result is worth having - a round module wrapped round a centre would only become a crescent.
Centre, disc radius and hub radius place the disc. The hub is not only a look: towards the middle of a disc the cells converge until they are narrower than a pixel, so a blank middle is what keeps the edges from turning to flat grey.
Ring density, in three zones, decides how the cells are distributed from hub to rim - square cells everywhere, or a middle deliberately thinned out the way real saucer plating is. Even ring count holds one count over the whole disc instead, which removes the rings a changing count leaves behind and suits a strict lattice such as Hex Grid.
The pattern closes where it meets itself going round the disc. The disc as a whole still cannot tile - it has no periodic edge - and the documentation has a new chapter that spells out how Columns, Rows and Ring density combine to decide what you actually get.

0.4.8

Minor changes in the documentation.
A favicon, so the tab can be told apart from the others.

0.4.7

Global scale reaches the seams in Greeble Panels. Its Gap and Bevel are absolute widths rather than fractions of a cell, so they stayed put while the panels around them shrank - far enough down the slider the seams were wider than the plates between them. They now come down with everything else. Below roughly a quarter scale a seam is thinner than a pixel and fades out, which is as fine as a height map of that size can hold.

0.4.6

Global scale. One slider in the Global block drives every layer's repeat counts at once, so a coarse stack can be made fine without opening a card. It steps rather than glides, because a count has to stay a whole number for the tile to keep closing, and it only shrinks - relief cannot grow past the top of the height range. Scale height too takes each layer's depth down with its pattern. The numbered masks come along; the Object layer, whose Scale X and Scale Y are a size rather than a count, shrinks with the slider instead of against it.
A start screen on the first load of a session, closed with the cross or with Escape.

0.4.5

Escape pods, a new group in the object library: a shield with a choice of fittings, a pyramid hatch, a plug, a pod body, a blast iris and a six sided pod. Every corner of every outline is cut, and by how much is a control.
The object library shows its pictures straight away. They are drawn ahead of time by the generator itself and ship with the app, so nothing is rendered when the panel first opens.

0.4.4

Random rotation for an array: every copy at an angle of its own, with a seed of its own to reroll them. It lands on top of the angle a copy already has, so a ring that faces outward still does, only scattered.

0.4.3

Layers can be called something. Double click the name in a card header, type, press Enter. Escape puts the old one back, and clearing the field returns the generator's own name. The name travels with the project file and the share link.
The F1 help and the manual caught up with the last few releases: the object library, arrays, the archive export, and renaming.

0.4.2

Arrays. One object becomes a row along X or Y, or a ring. Count, distance, a rotation for the layout rather than for the objects, and for a ring the choice of whether each copy faces outward. Close over the tile sets the distance to one over the count, which is the only length a row can have and still repeat.
The turbine no longer aliases. Its blades were measured as a fraction of a period, which jumps at every blade boundary and leaves a filter nothing to work with. They are an arc distance now, and they fade out toward the hub where a whole period grows thinner than a pixel.
The object library opens at once. Its pictures are kept in the browser between visits rather than being rendered again every time, and when they do have to be drawn it is one at a time instead of two dozen at once.
Two drives renamed to what the standards call them rather than what the brands do: Ribbed cross and Six-lobe.

0.4.1

A screw in the object library, under Screws. Head and drive are separate choices - round, countersunk, cheese or hex, with slot, cross, ribbed cross, hex socket, six-lobe or nothing - because any drive sits in any head. The slot runs rim to rim, cut off by the head's own outline rather than given a length.
Three ways to finish the edge of a head, and they combine: a chamfer that slopes the face down to the rim, a bevel that rolls the top edge over and leaves the face flat, and a rim step that cuts a shoulder at a depth you set.
The head no longer aliases along its rim. The height fell to the edge in less than a pixel, which is a step rather than an edge; it now spans the two pixels the rest of the app filters over. Hard crossings along the silhouette fell from 10.8 percent to 0.5.

0.4.0

Object, a layer that places one module on its own instead of a lattice of them: a hatch, a bore, an intake, a wheel. Position, two scale axes and a free angle. It still tiles - what leaves one edge comes back at the other.
An object library behind the Objects button beside Add layer, grouped by the layer each shape comes from, with a picture of every one. The pictures are rendered by the generator itself, so they show what you are about to place.
Four new round fittings in Discs & Hatches: turbine, flange, cap and ports. The cap's socket takes its side count from the same control the others count with.
Gear Rings no longer aliases along the teeth. The outer radius used to step between the root and tip circles, which left the flanks with nothing to filter. A tooth is now the wedge of its own span cut off at the tip circle, and the outline is one continuous distance - hard edges along the silhouette fell from 55 percent to 0.4.

0.3.8

Download all as ZIP. Tick the maps you want, with All and None beside the list, and get one archive at the export resolution. Only the 16-bit height is ticked to begin with, and preset.json always goes in, so the recipe travels with the result.
A progress bar above the canvas for anything that would otherwise look like a freeze: a large export, a change of preview resolution, and loading a project. On loading it starts as the file dialog closes - a browser can sit on a freshly downloaded file for several seconds before handing it over, and that is the wait you actually sit through.
Exports no longer hang in a background tab. They waited on an animation frame, and those never arrive while a tab is hidden. Switching away mid-export used to park it for good.
Discs & Hatches: the ring grooves are no longer blended below a pixel.

0.3.7

Cut corners in Greeble Panels, Box Scatter and Tech Tiles: corners clipped at 45 degrees, and a second control for how many of the four are cut. The diagonal was the one shape the set was missing.

0.3.6

A padlock in a layer's title row freezes it: its controls go dead, it cannot be removed or dragged, and the randomise buttons pass it by. It keeps its seed too, so a new global seed rerolls everything except the layers you have settled on.
The 3D preview no longer stair-steps along curves. Its mesh was coarser than the height field; now it follows it.
This window.

0.3.5

City, a new layer: blocks, streets and buildings seen from above. Street width falls with every split, so avenues and alleys come out of one subdivision.
The version number now sits beside the wordmark in the top left.
The documentation gained a closing chapter on what the program is built from, and a note that it comes with no warranty.
The privacy paragraph says outright that no cookie is set and nothing is tracked.

0.3.4

Weave, a new layer: plain, twill and basket, with threads that run through rather than breaking at every crossing.
Tech Tiles grew from six modules to fourteen, each with its own switch, share and height.
Motherboard gained a fourth routing style without junctions, a routing scale, per-kind heights, and heat sinks in place of what were called routing fields.
Erosion in Basic Landscape: rain that carves valleys into the terrain. It runs on the processor, so it takes a moment.
Scales and Veins & Cracks no longer alias along their edges.
Hex Grid can chain its two counts, at the ratio regular hexagons actually need.

HeightSmith

HeightSmith

What it does

The layer stack

What the controls are called

The 3D preview

Seamless tiling

Export

Where it comes from

Keyboard

Layout