L3DT release 2.2

Released on the 20th of October, 2004 (see announcement)

• New features
  • Allowed multiple climates. Up to 256 different climates may be used in one map, with up to 256 unique land types each. Climates are defined in the \Climates\*.cli files and listed in the \Climates\climates.ini file.
  • Added heightfield erosion routines, controlled by the design map.
  • Land types are now dependent on water-table and salinity, giving pretty grass & beach effects.
  • Calculation of water-table and salinity.
  • Added heightfield resampling + horizontal and vertical rescaling.
  • Added option to export texture list, used in run-time texture blending.
  • Added batch-generation engine, to generate multiple maps automatically.
• User interface
  • Reorganised menu system, with consolidation of most functions into 'Operations' menu.
  • Added flood-on-click mouse tool for making sea and lakes manually, with partial buffer redraw of invalidated regions only.
  • Allowed overlay of salinity map and heightfield in water map display.
  • Added customisable design map schemes, saved in \Settings\schemes.ini file.
  • Added climate drop-down box and erosion slider to new design map dialog box.
  • Replaced edit boxes with combo-boxes & slider-bars in design map pencil and edit pixel attributes. Also added 'Apply to all' option.
  • Added small, medium and large buffer size options, plus toggle option for over-buffering.
• File I/O
  • Changed format of map group file to be more human-readable.
  • Added 'native' support for Terragen and VTP heightfield files (.ter and .bt respectively) - these formats can now be used as default file formats in L3DT.
  • Mesh file export options for heightfield (only '.x' so far).
  • Added 'export selected area' option for saving smaller chunks of the heightfield.
  • Added support for jpeg load / save (finally!).
  • Added a file preferences dialog box to manage all the new file format options.
• Optimisations, bug fixes
  • Faster automatic lake-flooding routines due to better progressive testing of area limit over-flooding.
  • Increased speed and decreased exe size using of compiler optimisations.
  • Added an error log window and an error log file (log.txt).
• Mosaic maps
  • Disabled mosaic heightfields (need to write mosaic versions of new algorithms, eg erosion, water-table).