What's New: Surpac™ 6.6
Surpac 6.6 includes the following functionality:
Stope slicing
You can slice a valid solid into stopes, pillars, and crown pillars. You can set the size of the stopes to a target tonnage or volume, or use elevation, planes and distance to create the stopes. Using data from block model attributes you can create a stope slicing report that shows information such as volume of ore, or weight of contained metal, in each stope.
Stope design
A new set of stope design commands and functions are provided to help you create a practical mineable solid. To use these you need the Stope Design Tools module.
To access the Stope Designer functions, go to the Design > Stope design tools menu or the Underground Design toolbar.
When you use Stope Designer, you create a project (.sdproj) file. You initialise the project with a starting set of options and you can change these options and save them multiple times before exiting.
Stope Designer works with a set of planes. After you digitise a closed segment on a plane, you can run EVALUATE STOPE POLYGON to expand the digitised segments to the plane corridors forming a temporary solid, and storing data from the attributes of a block model.
After two or more planes contain a closed segment, you can use STOPE OBJECT CREATE to create a design solid which automatically connects all digitised segments, puts end caps on the solid, and then generates a final report on the stope that is created.
If you want to renumber trisolations, you can use the new TRISOLATION RENUMBER RANGE function.
Named attributes in solids and surfaces
Setting
To create and set a named attribute for a trisolation, you can use the new SclSetNamedAttributeValue command. For example, you could use this feature to store the rock type.
Getting
To get a list of the named attributes in an object, you can use the new SclGetAttributeNames command. To get the value of a named attribute, you can use the SclGetValueByName command.
Also, the new SclGetHandleNameList command gets the name of each triobject (or trisolation within each triobject) in the SWA.
Plotting table entities
You can now create a new table entity type in Plotting > Entity > New to plot cells from a spreadsheet file.
The table entity has basic layout options similar to a note entity to determine where on the sheet the data is displayed. The entity uses the cell layout formatting from the spreadsheet (for example, left and top aligned within the cell). You can use font options from the spreadsheet (bold, italic, underline and font family), or override these with specific user-defined font options.
After an entity is defined, you can create a map which tells the entity which data (Excel file name, worksheet and cell range) to plot.
You can repeat a header row when the columns spread over multiple tiles.
You can plot the data using Plotting > Process > Map.
You can also copy cells from a spreadsheet into a plot in the Surpac Plotting window. The cells become a table object that you can show or hide, move, delete, group or ungroup.
Rectangular search areas in geostatistics
Variogram modelling and Indicator Variogram modelling can now use a search area that is shaped like a pyramid with a rectangular prism attached, rather than a cone with a cylinder attached. This is useful if you need to increase the height or width of the search area rather than having a search area that extends equally in all directions.
Drafting mode
When you use Drafting mode (for example to create a point at a precise angle or distance from another point), you now digitise on the active plane.
Multiple dongles
If you have more than one dongle, for example if you run two GEOVIA products and they use different dongles, you can now run File > Licencing > Change/Inspect Licence, and select the specific dongle to use from the Dongle to license list.
If more than one dongle is detected when Surpac starts up, Surpac selects the last one that provided a valid licence.
Vulcan support
You can now open .00t (version 8) triangulation files in Surpac 6.6.
Surpac can also open 'classic' Vulcan .bmf block models, in addition to the 'extended' Vulcan .bmf block models that Surpac was already able to open.
Longer block model attributes
The maximum length of an attribute name in an .mdl file is now 128 characters rather than 30 characters. Therefore you might be able to open some block models that you could not previously open (if they were created in another mining package, and have an attribute greater than 30 characters in length).
GEOVIA Request Logger
Surpac now uses the same GEOVIA request logger that is used by all GEOVIA products, rather than the older Surpac logger. You can log a request using the Help > Log a Request command.
Hotfixes
Surpac now supports software hotfixes.