News for March 2008

L3DT release 2.5c is now available on the download pages in both Standard and Professional editions, and is also available for download via the GarageGames.com site for L3DT for Torque users.

This is a free update for all users of L3DT Standard, and for all users who have purchased a license for L3DT Professional or L3DT for Torque in the last 18 months (since September '06).

If the free update period of your license has lapsed, we are currently offering a 40% discount to users who renew their license, which entitles the users to another 18 month's worth of updates, improvements and bugfixes. This offer is currently limited to customers who purchased their licenses directly from Bundysoft before the 1st of January 2007. Eligible and interested users should contact sales@bundysoft.com to receive the relevant discount codes.

Users upgrading from L3DT release 2.5b will notice the following changes:

• The addition of an attributes map brush to Sapphire (see this blog post).
• Improvements to the Spring plugins (see this blog post), including a complete SMD compiler interface, SD7 archive support, type map support, and improved metal map support.
• A new materials manager/editor interface, which simplifies climate/texture development (see this blog post).
• New heightfield brush tools in the Sapphire 3D editor, including 'smooth', 'perlin' and 'avalanche'.
• Improvements to the scripting system, which enables the use of more custom heightfield effects (e.g., this volcano script).
• Support for importing custom map layers (see here).
• Improvements/bugfixes for the multi-core disk-paged calculation system.
• Improvements/bugfixes for the activation system, particularly for L3DT for Torque users.
• Several other bugfixes, mostly for user interface components (dialgos, wizards, tools, etc.)

Users upgrading from the most recent release of L3DT for Torque (release 2.5a) will notice the following additional changes:

• Substantial improvements to the 3D viewer/editor, including new heightfield tools, support for extremely large terrain textures, and numerous user-interface tweaks.
• The addition of a new, console-based plugin for compiling both unique and blended Atlas files (see here).
• The addition of a backup/restore feature for 'undoing' changes (see here).
• Support for DirectDraw Surface images (DDS) and Wavefront Object mesh files (OBJ).
• Various utility plugins, such as map rotation (see here), road making (see here and here), etc.

Here are some recent screenshots of L3DT v2.5c (and related), taken from the main gallery and the developmental gallery. Note the last image (bottom right) is a screenshot from Spring, showing a map exported from L3DT v2.5c using the SD7 plugins.

Zeolite has been updated to v2.5.3 (see change log). This update is relatively minor, and includes a few bugfixes and a couple of new functions.

Plugin developers should note that this updated API is only compatible with L3DT v2.5c or later. This means that plugins compiled with this updated API cannot be used with older versions of L3DT. However, plugins compiled with older versions of the API can still be used with the latest version of L3DT.

The majority of the user guide has been updated to reflect the latest changes, as has the fjord tutorial, Spring tutorial, and the initial sections of the climate tutorial. However, some sections of the user guide that relate to the new materials system may not yet be complete, but I hope to address this as soon as possible.

The next release on the cards is v2.6, and as always, my development plan is jam-packed with new and exciting things to do. The items that are currently tickling my interest include:

• An update manager (mostly done; will be included in next dev build).
• Further improvements to the attributes map brush (mostly done; will be included in next dev build).
• Plugin-defined terrain algorithms.
• Better user-interface for heightfield tools in Sapphire.
• Support for custom objects in Sapphire, including primitives and meshes.

If you would like to have input in the priorities for the next release, please feel free to post your ideas in the feature requests forum.

I'd one again like to thank the entire user community for their encouragement, suggestions and patience during the development of this release. A very big special super-thanks also goes out to anyone who posted a bug-report in the four months since the last release. Without their bug reports there could be no bug fixes (well, not as many).

If you would like to provide suggestions, criticisms or other feedback, please do so on this forum thread.

Cheerio, Aaron.

An unpleasant bug in the normals/light map calculation modules had made it through to the release build of L3DT 2.5c. I have updated the installers with a fixed version, and the file version number of the correct installers and L3DT executables should be 2.5.3.7, with a build date of the 31st of March 2008 (you can check this in the 'Help→About' box in L3DT). If you are using L3DT release 2.5c with an earlier version number or date (the 'broken' installer was 2.5.3.4 from the 19th of March), please re-install release 2.5c from the installers on the downloads page. For more info, or to post a comment, please see this forum thread.

Coming soon to a version of L3DT near you will be an update manager window, such as that shown below:

The purpose of this feature, as it explains itself (see text in window above), is to allow users to check for updates to L3DT or critical alerts (e.g. bug warnings.) The window, which works much like an RSS reader, will provide a brief summary of the update/alert, and a link to a page on the website with more information (e.g. release announcement), or to a direct download link.

There's still a little debugging and testing to do, so this feature won't be available in the next release (L3DT v2.5c), which is due for release in the next few days. It will however be included in the first of the developmental builds after release 2.5c, which will follow in the next few weeks or month(s). Correction: An early version of the update manager has made it into L3DT release 2.5c (23rd of March 2008).

Cheerio, Aaron.

Hi All,

In todays show-and-tell, I have for your perusal the new attributes map brush tool in the Sapphire 3D editor/renderer. This brush allows you to manually paint land types onto the attributes map, which will then be 'baked' onto the texture map or alpha maps when they are subsequently calculated.

A quick demonstration of this new tool is provided in the screenshots below, where I have carved a road onto the terrain using the 'bulldozer' brush in Sapphire, and then applied an 'asphalt' land type (from the new 'artificial' climate) to the road surface using the attributes map brush:

Screenshots: Using the brush

Using the attributes map brush in Sapphire.

Screenshots: After calculating the texture

The finished product, rendered in Sapphire.

I think the brush works quite well, and is really snappy and responsive even on large mosaic maps. Consequently, I've included a pre-release of this tool in the latest beta release (L3DT release 2.5c beta 1 build 2). However, please be mindful that the brush is not yet fully polished. In particular, I need to work on the following issues:

• Finer-grained brush movement and brush size (at the moment, the brush snaps to heightfield vertex positions.)
• Correct updating of mipmaps in the AM-image (both single image and mosaic.)
• Some form of auto-generate brush tool.
• An eyedropper tool.
• Documentation for the tool needs to be written.

If you'd like to give it a try, please download and install the latest beta release of L3DT 2.5c from the downloads page. 'L3DT for Torque' users should e-mail me for the link, via aaron@bundysoft.com.

Cheerio, Aaron.