If you would like a really easy way to keep track of what's happening in the forums or amongst the users' community, you might like to get yourself a news aggregator (eg. Feedreader, Google Reader) and subscribe to the following RSS feeds:
Your aggregator will then check for updates automatically, and highlight any new posts/images/articles added since your last perusal. You'll never have to go digging through forum threads again!
Please note there are currently no RSS feed for this news page or for the home page, but these will be added in good time.
I'm so excited about this I just had to use the funky blue news item title that I normally reserve for major releases1). In a veritable explosion of PHP, I can now offer to the L3DT users' community a brand-new forum, gallery, and wiki. Please think of these as your personal playgrounds.
To post images in the gallery or articles/files/whatever in the wiki, you first need to create an account in the forums. They all use the same data-base, so you don't need to create separate accounts for each. However, there are still some configuration issues to be sorted out, as described in this forum post. I also need to do a bit of template customisation to better-integrate the navigation of these systems with the main website and one another.
The mailing list will remain in operation for those who wish to use it, but I suspect it will slide into disuse in the face of this, dare I say it, WEB 2.0 ONSLAUGHT!!!!1111
For those that are interested, the forum uses phpBB2, the gallery is Coppermine, and the wiki is DokuWiki. I can't praise these packages enough; they were very easy to install (which is good, since I'm a day-one PHP n00b), and linking Coppermine and DokuWiku to the phpBB user database took a couple of minutes apiece. I'll let you know how the rest of the integration goes.
There is a new update available for L3DT Professional that includes two new features:
Both of these features are still undocumented, and should be considered to have 'beta' status. They will be included in the Standard Edition in a month or two.
Registered users can download the update from the regular place…wink wink, nudge nudge.
I've recently updated the style of the website, adding a new menu to the left-hand-side of each page that replaces the old silvery-looking menu that can still be seen on old news page. If you experience any strange page navigation problems or find broken-links with this new system, please e-mail me at aaron@bundysoft.com and I will fix things forthwith.
There was a bug in the export wizard that messes-up the map data when you resize a heightfield for export. This has been fixed, and I've updated both the Standard and Professional installers.
Just for the record, the current version is 2.3b Rev. 17, and the release-date is 08-Nov-05.
A password is now required to access the L3DT Professional download site. If you're a registered user, please send me an e-mail to receive the password.
Many thanks to the beta-testers, who did a great job of stress-testing all the new features (and suggesting new ones). There have been a large number of changes from 2.3a to 2.3b, most of which are listed on the release history page. Below I have summarised the key changes.
L3DT has been split into two releases. On the downloads page you can find the installer for L3DT Standard Edition. This version includes all the commonly used features, and is intended to be sufficient for most users' needs.
For expert users and developers, there is also a Professional Edition (still in beta-release). This version includes some of the more advanced, experimental, or just plain untested features, and is available via free registration.
A break-down of features in the two versions is included on the registration page comparison page.
…is now supported. Please refer to the alpha map tutorial for more info.
There have been a great number of improvements on the file I/O front, most notably:
I have discontinued native support for the TNF (terrain normals file) and LMF (light map file), both of which have been wholly superseded by the bitmap, JPEG and PNG formats. If you load an old map that contains a TNF and/or LMF, you will not be able to save the map unless you first open the file preferences dialog and select another format for the terrain normals map and/or the light map. By default, L3DT now uses JPEG for both.
I've finally splashed-out and bought some real web-hosting for L3DT. Welcome to www.bundysoft.com, a domain named in part after a cat that slept on my feet, hunted rabbits, and dribbled when happy.
In other news, Go Daddy have insanely low prices for web-hosting.