Burr Tools 0.1.9 review

Burr Tools will help you solve a certain kind of puzzle. Namely puzzles that are made out of square or dice shaped units and whose

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Andreas Rover

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Burr Tools will help you solve a certain kind of puzzle.

Namely puzzles that are made out of square or dice shaped units and whose solution also contains only rectangular aligned pieces.

Here are some key features of "Burr Tools":
Does nearly all that PuzzleSolver 3D which is
You can enter all puzzles that are assembled out of dice shaped units
Find assemblies for you puzzle
Disassemble the found assembly them
Show everything in a 3 dimensional image
Animate how the puzzle has to be assembled
Toggle the visibility of pieces in the solution to have a look at the inner workings of a puzzle. This is especially helpful for box packing puzzles
Runs on Windows and Linux and probably is also compilable on MacOS
You can specify which cubes to fill and which can be empty or full. PuzzleSolver 3D has only 2 modes. Either all cubes may be left empty in the solution, or the cubes that have an empty neighbor must be filled. BurrTools are more flexible here.
More than one problem in one file (e.g. have several Soma Cube problems in the same file)
Constraints to piece placements (like checkerboard)
Group pieces together to tell the disassembler that they don't need to be taken apart this is necessary for puzzles like "Cube In Cage" where the cage can not be taken apart but has 3 movable pieces
No limits to sizes and number of shapes. As long as your computer has the memory and you the patience the program will do it for you, even if it takes eons.
Free as in beer. It doesn't cost you anything
Free as in speech. The source is available, so you can do your own programming or help me improve continue improving the program in case I have to stop working on it.
Save puzzles with solutions in compressed XML-files. This allows you to create puzzles with other means (like your own burrgrower, ...)
A library is provided that helps you to write your own software for puzzle design and analysis

What's New in This Release:
Disassembler improvements include better move generation, merging when x pieces move the same amount in the same direction, and unmerging when they move a different amount.
Lots of interface changes and many new functions were added to ease the drawing of puzzles.
Huge speed improvements were made for different kinds of puzzles.
The ability to export images of shapes, problems, or solutions with complete assembly was added.
Bugs were removed.