Date: 18th of November 2003
The maximum map size in L3DT 2.1 has increased from 16 million pixels (4096 x 4096) to 1 billion pixels (32,768×32,768). That's equivalent to 107,000 sq km of map (~Tennessee) at 10m resolution.
RAM: The typical RAM requirement is about 50Mb with a maximum of about 100Mb for some operations. The new 'mosaic map' architecture manages the RAM usage by automatically caching to HDD.
HDD: If you have Tennessee-sized ambitions you'll want a Texas-sized hard disk drive. A gigapixel map will take 16 gigabytes of hard-disk real-estate (inc. textures, normals, etc). A more modest 1024 x 1024 map eats only 16Mb.
CPU: You don't need a workstation, but if you don't have a fairly-quick CPU you might need a lot of patience. L3DT 2.1 takes about 2 CPU-days on my home AMD XP2600+ to generate a 1 billion pixel map - including the heightfield, attributes map, water map, normals, light map and texture (the heightfield alone takes ~10 hours). It takes 1 minute 30sec to make a 1024 x 1024 map (inc. texture, etc).
L3DT now does pretty interpolated textures (example one, two). There is also support for user-defined climates & land types. It was all a bit of a last-minute addition and the climate stuff is fairly provisional, but I'll tidy things up in release 2.2.
I've broken the backwards-compatibility with older attributes map files, so it's a good idea to re-calculate the AM for any old maps from release 2. I'm going to re-write the AMF format for release 2.2.
Heightfields can now be imported & exported in a few useful formats:
If you're feeling adventurous you can make interesting terrain by importing photographs as bitmap heightfields (example).
I've changed the format of the L3DT heightfield and water-map files, and I've posted the new file specs on the Tutorial page (in Appendix B)formats page. The file formats are now officially:
L3DT 2.1 will still load the older HFF and WMF formats, but the new ones are much nicer and won't be subject to change for a long time. I therefore suggest you open any old maps and re-save them (2.1 automatically updates the files to the new formats).
Oops! The WMF file spec isn't posted because I haven't quite finished it yet - I still have to debug the run-length encoding.
A beta-version of the new L3DT Viewer (L3DTVi2), written by Stuart Gooding, is available on the downloads page. If you ask me, it's a masterpiece of Delphi / GLScene coding. Top work, Stu!
In addition to L3DTVi2 you can load the maps into Terragen, VTEnviro, or any 3D environment that can load greyscale bitmap heightfields.
I've done a bit of work on the UI (eg click-drag zooming).
Sea-flooding is now 9x to 10x faster than in release 2, but there is a little bug that stops mosaic flooding sometimes. I'm still searching…
I've thrown-in a lot of PeekMessage calls to keep L3DT responsive during calculations. While this does make L3DT a bit slower, it means you don't get the unpleasant 'Not responding' message.
Otherwise it's pretty much the same as L3DT 2.0 .
The tutorial and algorithms pages have been updated. In particular, the tute page has grown quite a bit and now includes a brief 'walkthrough' to get you started.