L3DT release 2.4 beta1

Released on the 14th of April, 2006 (see announcement)

• User interface
  • Dialogs:
    • Added climate manager and climate editor dialogs.
    • Revised file preferences dialog (better-looking, new options button, etc…).
  • Wizards:
    • Added a water-mapping wizard, to consolidate water-plane, sea, lakes, and water-table operations.
    • Simplifed import design map wizard.
    • Revised the water table modelling wizard (now list-based).
    • Added 'file options' buttons to export and mosaic wizards.
  • Add in-application walkthrough-guide for new users.
  • Report error when off-line docs aren't found, and prompt user to fix the file path entry.
  • Enabled user-defined standard fonts for many dialogs.
• File I/O
  • Made XML reader/writer.
  • Replaced messy text files with nice, strict XML:
    • Map group files (.mgf), now '.proj'.
    • Map definition files (.def), now '.def.xml'.
    • Water body list (_WBL.txt), now '_WBL.xml'.
    • Application settings files (.ini), now '.ini.xml' (mostly).
    • Climate files (.cli), now '.cli.xml' (with auto-converter).
  • Added RAW heightfield import (with several different modes).
  • Added option to invert RAW, BMP, JPEG, PNG, for export/import.
  • Added colour-mapped PNG option for attributes map (can be edited in image software).
  • Added support for lat/lon coordinates in BT loader/saver.
  • Updated map project summary to XHTML 1.0 strict (was HTML 4.01 strict), and enabled in Standard Edition.
  • Removed FileVersionNo from mosaic master file (.mmf).
• Settings
  • Added user preferences (in 'local.ini.xml').
  • Made users' file preferences persistent for non-default formats.
  • Enabled settings dialogs for L3DT Standard Edition (except for 'presets', which aren't included in L3DT SE).
• Bug fixes
  • Fixed support for 120DPI (and other, unknown DPIs).
  • Fixed installer behaviour (allow multiple L3DT installations).
  • Disabled I/O buffer-flushing during ini file-loading.
  • Fixed coordinate mapping in LinInterp (was doing bad things for resampling HF, high-res mosaic, etc).
• Structural
  • Upgrade compiler to VC7.
  • Switch to FreeImage from CxImage and libpng.