Seamlessly tiled mesh files

Hi Everyone,

This is a little preview of the seamlessly tiled mesh exporter that's coming in the next build. This new exporter allows you to export the whole map, or just a selected area thereof, as one or more mesh files. If you export the map as a set of files, the exporter will ensure that the tiles match up seamlessly. The exporter also exports the texture and material information, and optionally other map layers too (alpha maps, etc.)

Here's a video, taken in my 3D renderer of choice¹⁾, showing a 4×4 tiled map being loaded tile-by-tile from mesh files produced by the new exporter:

For the interested, each tile represents a 256×256 tile of heightfield pixels, which was converted into an optimised mesh of about 19k triangles per tile by the exporter using the mesh decimator plugin.

This new mesh exporter is included in the next developmental build, and I will make an more in-depth announcement when it is available for download.

Finally, a hat tip goes to Miko for the feature requests, bug reports and discussions that provided the impetus for this development. This exporter is, in essence, a grandiose 'test case' for the functionality Miko requested.

Cheers, Aaron.