Another release coming soon
Hi Everyone,
A new release of L3DT is now planned for October or November*. Little did I know last month when I released L3DT v11.08 that some
easy optimisations** could be made that would dramatically improve calculation speeds. The new version proved to be
over twice as fast as the previous two releases (v11.08 and v2.9) at running a mixed bag of typical map calculations (namely,
this batch file). The batch calculation times for each version*** were:
- L3DT 11.09 build 3 - 3.3 hours.
- L3DT release 11.08 - 6.9 hours.
- L3DT release 2.9 - 6.9 hours.
A beta version of the next release will be available within a fortnight, but in the mean-time you can get all these goodies in the latest developmental build of L3DT Pro (11.09 build 3), which is on the downloads page now. L3DT for Torque users should reply here or PM me for the download link.
Users of the free L3DT Standard Edition should note that they will see a much more modest speed improvement than that described above, since most of these optimisations rely on multi-threading, and have maximum effect on large map sizes (>4k x 4k pixels), neither of which are supported in the Standard Edition. Nevertheless, there will still be some improvement due to the optimised normal map and texture interpolation routines, which will speed up the generation of normal maps, light maps and textures.
If you find any problems with this build, or would like to suggest any further changes, please reply to this forum thread.
Cheers,
Aaron.
* The next release was to be codenamed "Confused Chihuahua"
due to popular demand, but the YouTube video is...ahem...
a little unsavoury. I might go with the more family-friendly "
Dramatic Chipmunk" instead. An oldie but a goodie.
** Insofar as anything involving multi-threading and dynamic cache management can be considered 'easy'.
*** All tests were performed on a quad-core Intel Q6600 with 4GB of RAM running Win7 x64 Pro.
