News for December 2004

L3DT can now export to the GLScene height tile file (HTF) format. The new version is available on the downloads page.

I've made an off-line version of the tutorial available on the downloads page as a zip archive (1.4MB).

For the sake of the many GLScene users out there, I've added a HTF file writer to my to-do list. My Delphi→C++ translation abilities are yet to be tested, however, so this may take a little while.

In case I don't touch the website again within the next ten days, which is quite likely, I wish you all a very merry festive season. May your grievances be aired, your aluminium poles be unadorned, and your feats of strength be mighty indeed (What the...?).

…don't release software at 2am!. By that I mean, of course, that release 2.2a had a very minor bug.

The map display may have black blocks or bands when re-drawing after the completion of some calculations, on some systems (only Win2k so far). This occurs when the user-interface thread tries to draw the display buffer but is denied access to a map that is in use by the worker thread. Instead of aborting and flagging for a re-draw, the buffer drawing routine aborted without setting the redraw flag. The problem has been fixed, and the newer version is available on the downloads page.

This revision to L3DT 2.2 is largely a 'look-and-feel' upgrade to make L3DT easier to use - particularly for new users. The main changes include:

• Addition of the next button in the toolbar, so that you don't have to remember the right sequence of menu options.
• Progress bars now have 'cancel' buttons, as well as time estimates for most calculations (via multithreading).
• There's now a delete water body mouse tool.
• The mouse cursor is now mode-dependent (FINALLY!).

If you experience any problems with this release, please tell me so.