Project Dogwaffle, the award-winning paint software program, which recently launched v.2, has now announced a 2.0b patch with more speed, mouse caching, new plug-ins and bug fixes. The patch requires Dogwaffle 2.0 already installed on your PC and checks for its validity.

It is a free patch. The size is about 1.25 MB.

Go to www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/freebies/2dot0b.html for downloading instructions.

Project Dogwaffle is animation with onion skins, timeline keyframing, lens flares, user-defined animated brushes, fractal particle brushes, stroke player, sky effects, fast filters, tablet support, special FX, chromakeying, among features.

Here are several of the enhancements and fixes:

* Fixed bug where copying to swap and copying alpha to swap didn't refresh layers panel.
* Basic painting with internal brushes/default mode falls back to simple model of internal engine. Now supports painting with alpha.
* Optimized inner loop of simple model (internal brushes).
* Optimized large model (internal brushes) so that opacity for paper, brush and alpha is done with one calculation.
* Minor code cleanup.
* Bug fix: Couldn't shrink a window with "Ctrl" when the program first started because scale wasn't initialized.
* Added SmudgeStick filter plug-in.
* Removed titlebar refresh while drawing.
* Added option for mouse caching. Should help with segmenting on older/slower systems.
* Made a number of changes to the mouse handling system, reworking the stroke recorder to better work with the caching system, and general cleanup.
* Made a small adjustment to dynamic range compensation, so it ignores image borders, since convolution operations often leave incorrect borders.
* Added "cold lava" plug-in.
* When resizing buffer, Brush settings panel was accounted for when it wasn't visible.
* Added support for pressure to stroke recorder.
* Made sobel filter faster.
* Added color sobel filter.
* Merging layers didn't clear the merge layers checkbox after merging, even though mixing was turned off.
* Added Quilt plug-in.
* Added Error diffusion plug-in.
* Fixed mosaic to center the blocks; made slightly faster.

For more info, go to Dogwaffle creator Dan Ritchie's homepage: www.squirreldome.com.