Fixed stations are easily specified with a checkbox. You can cut, copy, paste and delete one more rows of data at the same time. Individual cells can also be cut, copied, pasted, deleted and edited.

Compass now gives you the choice of displaying absolute, sea level elevations or entrance relative elevations.

Since Compass allows you to have the different projects for the same data, you can process the data in different ways depending which project-file you use.

The image below shows the location of moonmilk in Fulford Cave. The "Stars" WingDing symbols are not normally available in SVG files.

1. Interpolation. The interpolation between animation points has been improved to make it more linear and smooth. In the past, the zoom would happen faster than panning so the animation would appear to zoom in before it panned to the destination. This was disorienting because you would be zoomed so tight that you'd lose your perspective on where you were going and how you got there.

3. Distance Color/Passage Modeling. The passage modeling fill colors now support the option of coloring by distance. In this mode, far passages are colored a different color from near passages. This makes the cave look more three dimensional.

1. Drag mode option is enabled by default. The Viewer has two mode of navigating through a cave: Box-Mode and Drag-mode. In box-mode, the mouse manipulates a selection box that shows you exactly what part of the cave will be selected. In drag-mode, the cave is dragged by the mouse to whatever position you want. 

Since the drag-mode is more intuitive and allows easier control of the cave, drag-mode is enabled by default.

2. Control turns on Drag-Mode. Holding down the control-key, unconditionally enables drag-mode. This is useful when you are using one of the Tools, which takes over the mouse. For example, if you are using the Find-Survey tool, the mouse-navigation features don't work because the tool uses the mouse to find surveys and stations. Holding down the control-key overrides tool, and the program switches to drag-mode. This makes it easier to navigate while you are using tools.

3. Animated Zoom. You can now double click anywhere on the cave and Compass will pan and zoom into the spot where you clicked. The pan and zoom are animated, so it smoothly transitions from the current view to the new on. This makes it less confusing than instantly jumping from one view to another.45

5. Fixed Loops. If a cave has two or more fixed stations that are connected by a survey, this will form a loop.  Part of the loop is made up of the shots that connect the fixed-stations and part is made up by an imaginary line  that connects the two fixed-stations. In other words, only part of the loop is made up of surveyed shots and part is made of an imaginary shot-line. Compass now tracks each part of the loop separately. Among other things, this is useful for determining if a loop is a natural loop or an artificial loop that only exists because of fixed stations.

The new version also allows you to color the non-loop part of the plot gray to make it easier to see the loops. Finally, the new version allows you to sort the loop-list by column. In other words, you can sort the list by error level, number of shots, common shot etc.

The new features can make it easier to find and correct errors. For example, the image to the right shows a portion Lechuguilla cave with loops highlighted according to error level. As you can see, the errors tend to concentrate in certain areas of the cave. This may indicate that certain survey teams, certain instruments or certain eras of exploration produce more errors. It also may indicate that a poorly surveyed passage is shared among several loops.

You can selectively enable the display of any combination of comments of individual Survey Comments, Station Comments and Annotations.

The image to the right shows the new tool that is used to selectively display survey-comments. Checking the box next to any survey-comment will cause that comment to be displayed in the plot. Like wise, un-checking the box next to a survey, hides the comment for that survey. 

The image to the right shows the survey comments and boxes for the selected surveys shown above. The image shows the  Entrance section of Lechuguilla Cave.

Similar features are available for station-comments. Plus, if you put a special {P} symbol in a station comment, the Viewer will automatically check that comment when the plot-file loads

Survey comments are displayed at the bottom-left corner of the survey extent. Station comments are placed next to the station.

Old Version: 32 seconds.
New Version:  6 seconds.

That is more than five times improvement.

2. Animation Speed. Here are animation speeds for Lechuguilla:

Old Version: 2 Frames/Sec.
New Version: 16.4 Frames/Sec

Old Version: 1.7 million triangles/sec
New Version: 16.7 million triangles/sec

The increase in display speed makes it much easier to animate large caves like Lechuguilla. These times are for a somewhat older graphics card, newer computers and graphics cards should be much faster.

The new labels are a fixed size, no matter how much you are zoomed in or zoomed out. Likewise, they always face toward the front, so they can be read from any angle.

Finally, in the old version, station marks consisted of a small cube or tetrahedron, which was very small when you zoomed out and got progressively larger when you zoomed in. In the new version, station labels stay the same size whether you are zoomed in or out. They also face the same direction

These options are useful when you are trying solve loop closure problems, find errors and looking at an overview of how the survey data is organized.

A. The Up/Down arrow buttons can move multiple surveys at once. If you have more than one survey highlighted, all of them will move when you press the up/down arrow buttons.

B. You can now drag and drop multiple surveys at once. If you have multiple surveys highlighted all the highlighted surveys will be moved.

C. You can now delete multiple surveys at once. If you have multiple surveys highlighted all the highlighted surveys will be deleted. The program will warn you before the files will be deleted.

D. The Up/Down arrow buttons will auto repeat if you hold the button down. This speed up the process of moving surveys into position.

Note: You must recompile your caves with the latest version of the Compiler before the feature will be available. Old versions of plot files and older versions of Compass don't support this feature.

1. Standard Loops are the same loops used to close the cave and the same loops used by the Project Manager to calculate loop statistics and locate blunders. They have the same name and order as the loops shown in the Project Manager. You would use this option when you are trying to understand loop errors or fix blunders.

2. Optimized Loops are calculated on the fly from the compiled data, optimizing the loops for minimum overlap and minimum size. As a result, the order and configuration of the loops may be completely different from those presented in the Project Manager. Certain loops, such as those that are closed via Fixed Stations, will not appear in the Optimized loops. Likewise, shots that are excluded from plotting won't be shown. You would use this option when your are trying to find minimum sized loops for resurvey work.
 

The program won't generate an exact duplicate of the original survey files. This is because compiling survey data into a PLT file may change things in the data. For example, loop closure, magnetic declination and UTM convergence alter the station positions so that when the surveys are reconstructed, shot length, compass and inclination angle will have changed. Nevertheless, compiling the reconstructed survey files will produce an exactly duplicate of the original line-plots

The image to the below shows a simple cave, with the blue lines representing the survey shots and the yellow points representing the survey stations.

The triangles will be used analyze the points and will be used to create a bounding box that closely approximates the shape of the cave.

Concave Hull. Because the cave may have gaps in the mass of points, the program needs to generate polygon that traces these gaps. A Concave Hull will follow the gaps. A Concave Hull is generated by selectively removing outer triangles and drawing the polygon into the space left behind.

Anomalies. Since the program works by analyzing the positions of survey stations, the Hull may sometimes cross the passage. That would mean that part of the cave would fall outside our bounding box.

To solve this problem, the program has the option of adding extra points along the path of the passage, For example, you can add points that represent the Left and Right passage walls. You can also subdivide passages that are longer than a certain length This helps prevent the passages from falling out the of hull.

The values will be displayed in the box on the right side of the window.

The feature is useful for highlight routes and to make them more visible in a cave map. It is also useful for emphasizing an area of the cave for presentations and publications. Like other features in the Complex options, the line-width feature can be combined with other features for more dramatic effect. For example, the image to the right combines yellow coloring with and a 3-pixel line-width to emphasize a particular route through the cave.

Loops are generated by selecting one station of the closing-station pair, holding down the Alt key and clicking on the other station. There is more information about MapToDat further down the page.

There were also 20 updates during 2013 that included bug fixes, improvements and new features.

The feature allows you to see the relationship between each fixed stations and the rest of the cave. This is useful for verifying that survey errors between fixed stations are properly adjusted out.

You have complete control of the size and color of the Fixed Station Markers. There is also a new feature that allows you to offset the position of the Station Labels. This makes it easier to read the Station Name when there are other markers and text near the stations. The example to the right shows Station Labels offset by about 5 pixels which provides enough extra room to see both the Fixed Stations Marks and the label indicating which station is the Fixed Location.

Compass now allows you to handle that situation by extending the base zone so it encompasses the caves beyond it. This is standard practices in cartography.

The Compass KML exporter gives you complete control over the Fill Color, the Outline Color and the transparency of the passages. By making the passage partially transparent, you can see the details of the terrain through the overlay.