L3DT development blog
Large 3D terrain generator

News for October 2004

October 31

Wassup?

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.

2011/01/13 07:32

October 28

A couple of screenshots from L3DTVi2

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.

2011/04/01 13:43

October 25

Website update

What's new, daddy-o?

  • Added Aaron Pollyea's work with Celestia to the users' gallery.
  • Fixed some spelling and grammar mistakes.
2011/01/13 07:32

October 20

L3DT 2.2 released

Hey, it's finally here…and I thought I'd never live to see the day. It only took eleven months.

New features

In the most severe case of feature-creep I've yet seen, the following improvements have been made to L3DT:

  • Speed - L3DT 2.2 is about 10× faster than release 2.1 for most operations, thanks in part to compiler optimisations.
  • Improved land types and texture mapping (see gallery page for results).
  • Heightfield erosion (example screenshot).
  • More supported file formats, including the DirectX '.x' mesh format.
  • A batch engine for making lots of maps in 'hands-off' mode.
  • Heightfield resampling + horizontal and vertical rescaling.
  • Flood-on-click mouse tool for making sea and lakes wherever you desire.
  • Calculation of water-table and salinity (example) - used in climate modelling.
  • Easier interface for editing the design map.
  • Some support for run-time texture blending.

For a complete list of changes please refer to the release history page.

Compatibility issues

L3DT 2.2 isn't completely compatible with L3DT 2.1:

  • Attributes maps won't load properly because the climate model has been substantially upgraded. It's no big loss, I assure you.
  • Mosaic heightfields, water maps, attributes maps, terrain normals and light maps are broken (mosaic textures are still OK). I hope to fix this in subsequent minor updates.

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.

Next release?

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.

L3DT viewer news

Improvements to the viewer by Stuart Gooding include:

  • A detail map, for pretty up-close stuff.
  • A skybox, for pretty far-away stuff.
  • A basic water map renderer.

Refer to the gallery for pretty screenshots from L3DTVi2.

Website stuff

Modifications include:

  • I've added a whole lot more content to the tutorial pages, which are now accessed from the information page.
  • I've written a new release 2.3 'to-do' list.
  • Added the users' gallery and TerraGen gallery.
  • Added the FAQ, release history, file formats and reference pages.
  • Updated some bits of the algorithms page.

Phew, I'm going to have a lie-down now.

2011/04/01 13:45

October 14

Damn backwards compatibility!

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.

2011/01/13 07:32

October 10

Debugging again

Nearly there.

2011/01/13 07:32

October 7

Getting there

Well, the code compiles again. There are a few bugs to chase down still.

2011/01/13 07:32
 
l3dt/2004/oct.txt · Last modified: 2017/08/31 05:16 (external edit)
 
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