L3DT development blog
Large 3D terrain generator

Progress report on v2.4 beta3

The development plan for v2.4 beta3 has lurched away from what I had previously planned (i.e. scripting). Instead, most of the changes in this next beta-release are improvements to the climate/texturing system, plus a number of bug-fixes.

Textures and bump-maps

I've been busy improving high-resolution texture output from L3DT. In previous versions each land type could have only two textures/bump-maps - one for 'low-res' and one for 'high-res'. In Beta3 each land type may have an arbitrary number of textures and bump-maps, each with arbitrary horizontal scaling. The texture-layer-combiner also supports textures in modulation-mode, so you can bake greyscale (or colour) detail-maps onto ultra-high res textures.

As for bump-mapping, previous versions of L3DT used a cheap-n-nasty vector combiner that produced imperfect results on sloped terrain. I've re-written this using a proper matrix transformation1) so that the bump-mapping works properly in all cases. Here is a pretty screenshot:

16xtex1.jpg

Another change is the introduction of strata mapping, of which this is a quick (and less pretty) example:

desert-er1.jpg

Land type editor

Beta1 and beta2 used my generic 'tree-edit dialog' as the land type editor interface. In beta3 there will be a dedicated dialog, which should hopefully be a little more usable and a little less daunting. Screenshots will follow at a later date.

Bug fixes

The clean-up continues for the bugs introduced in the first two betas of v2.4 due to changes in file formats, script-handling and data structures. These are mostly user-interface and file input/output problems (listed here).

Release schedule

Beta3 is at least a week away. The changes in texture-handing caused quite a bit of splash-damage on other parts of the code that now need to be upgraded. I also need to update the textures/bump-maps in the 'standard' climates (temperate, arctic, desert).

At the moment I don't plan to make a beta4, so the next update after beta3 will be the release-version of L3DT v2.4. Finally!

A question

For the commercial release, is PayPal an acceptable payment method, or would you prefer something more elaborate? Replies are welcome in the forum.

1) A big thank-you goes to my 1st year university mathematics textbook for the quick refresher on matrix algebra, determinants and vector cross-products.
 
l3dt/2006/may/23.txt · Last modified: 2017/08/31 05:36 (external edit)
 
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