News for August 2005

I've added a new step-by-step guide to the tutorial that shows the process involved in designing a map from scratch (link here). This page deals specifically with designing a fjord, although the same basic procedure is applicable to just about any land type. If you want to see screenshots, check out the mini-gallery at the bottom of the tute.

In other business:

• L3DT 2.3b is nearly ready for beta testing (probably in the next fortnight).
• Following the previous post, it seems these people most certainly have heard of an exabyte (thanks Ivan).
• I've just returned from an unannounced interstate business trip, so I've got at least half a reason for not having replied to e-mails yet.
• I still haven't set up a new domain for L3DT, but I'll get right onto it. Soon. Soon-ish.

I got to thinking the other day that the map size limit - which is 32k×32k pixels in the current release - was just a little bit too low. Sooner or later, I though, someone might want something bigger. So, I've upgraded the mosaic map system to use a 64-bit indexing variable, and the new size limit is 2Gpxl×2Gpxl, or 4.6×10¹⁸ pixels - it's so stupendously large I had to Google for the prefix.

However, some sanity has prevailed. I've coded-in a practical limit at around 4 terapixels to prevent the mosaic state table from getting too big. Four trillion pixels per map is still a lot of bits, mind you. Anyhow, since I don't have a couple of terabytes at my disposal right now, it's kind of hard to actually verify this new size limit. I have made a 128k×64k texture, which at 8 billion pixels was enough to prove that the old limit no longer applies. It's not the same thing, but heh.

The bad news is that I'm not planning to increase the allowed height map size from 32k×32k until L3DT 2.4. In the next release, these new extra-big mosaics will only apply to the texture map, which will get a maximum size limit of 512k×512k (256 gigapixels). This is to allow 16× high-res textures for all height map sizes.

I've added an exporter for writing the heightfield as 16-bit PNG images using libpng. It wasn't too hard after all.

Also, I think I've finished the implementation of texture splatting, and I've even written the tutorial.

If you've been waiting for these features, you won't have to wait too much longer. There are only a few bug-fixes and behind-the-scenes things to do before release 2.3b is ready.

I've made some more progress on texture splatting, some of which is now described on the algorithms page (with pretty pictures). With regards to this feature, I still have to:

• Export alpha maps as mosaic images (i.e. split images into tiles).
• Finish the implementation of the user-interface.

Unless there are any objections, I plan to remove the old 'export texture list' option, as it is rendered obsolete by proper texture splatting support. This option was a cheap-n-nasty way of getting the alpha-maps for run-time blending, but required the use of the attributes map file rather than a set of image files.

Looks like the L3DT website will be moving to a new address some time in the next month. We've had a few issues with our current host, so I'm going to fork out some cash on some real web-hosting, get a domain name, etc. I'll advise everyone on the new URL when I know myself, but I can guarantee that it will be a lot shorter than the current [edit: previous] http://users.tpg.com.au/blakest2/l3dt/index.htm. Cheers.