L3DT is getting a worker thread for some calculations, which means that you, dear user, will finally get a 'cancel' button. This modification is already well underway, and shouldn't take very long (by my standards, at least).
By the way, the gallery page has been updated and I've shuffled the website somewhat.
This post is just a little showcase of the texture capabilities of L3DT release 2.2. The two images below are L3DTVi2 screenshots of an L3DT-generated 4096×4096 heightfield and 16,384×16,384 texture. The texture map was split into a mosaic of 1024 JPEG images, each 512×512 pixels, and took about 2 hours to generate on an AMD XP2600+.
Image not loaded? | Image not loaded? |
(click on images to enlarge) |
A frame rate of between 30 and 60fps was achieved in L3DTVi2 when static. However, L3DTVi2 did freeze-up when I increased the viewing distance beyond the critical threshold at which the graphics card ran out of on-board memory. Therefore:
Be careful with the 'fog slider' when using older / El Cheapo graphics cards.
256Mb cards are recommended for big maps.
What's new, daddy-o?
Hey, it's finally here…and I thought I'd never live to see the day. It only took eleven months.
In the most severe case of feature-creep I've yet seen, the following improvements have been made to L3DT:
For a complete list of changes please refer to the release history page.
L3DT 2.2 isn't completely compatible with L3DT 2.1:
Also, there have been some changes to the map group file format, so older versions of L3DT and L3DTVi2 will not load new L3DT 2.2 maps.
Check out the 'to-do' list. A few features here and there are not fully implemented, and these will be the subject of subsequent minor updates (2.2a, b, c… maybe). The plan for the next little while is to produce more frequent minor updates to include bug-fixes and user-requested additions in a reasonable time-span.
Improvements to the viewer by Stuart Gooding include:
Refer to the gallery for pretty screenshots from L3DTVi2.
Modifications include:
Phew, I'm going to have a lie-down now.
Release 2.2 is ready, except for the fact that it cannot load maps from release 2.1 (not even of any kind). I should be able to fix this in the coming week.
Nearly there.
Well, the code compiles again. There are a few bugs to chase down still.