News for December 2005

Yay verily, the high-res texture algorithm in L3DT 2.3c is vastly improved. In the old algorithm, the land types were interpolated between attributes-map pixels, which made high-res textures a bit blurry at interfaces between land types. The new algorithm, which will only be available in L3DT Professional, calculates the land types procedurally per-texture-pixel, which makes the textures look much more detailed.

I've posted a few pretty piccies in the users' gallery, one of which is this:

L3DT 2.3c also includes high-resolution lightmapping, but I don't have any screenies to show right now.

There was a fault in the way some older parts of L3DT handled file paths. I noticed this when trying to use the 'register new climate…' feature, which simply didn't work at all. This has been fixed in both Standard and Professional editions, which are available on their respective downloads pages.

Both editions are now at version 2.3b rev 22 (15-Dec-05).

Only few minor changes in this update:

• The maximum RAM-only texture size is increased to 32k×32k pixels.
• There is some extra debugging output from the activation-code module.

This update only applies to the Professional Edition, which is now at version 2.3b rev 21 (13-Dec-05). The Standard Edition is unchanged on version 2.3b rev 17 (08-Nov-05).

Hurrah! A month has elapsed since L3DT 2.3b was released on the new website, and things are going swimmingly. There have been 80 new registrants for the beta-release of L3DT Professional, ten of whom were from yesterday alone.

The website is getting a very healthy amount of traffic too; yesterday 200 unique visitors combined to make 1,200 page requests (according to Google Analytics). The new community forum, gallery and wiki - which are all about two and a half weeks old - have had the bugs shaken out and are beginning to attract some interest and involvement from the users, which is great to see.

In programming news: I've been making some good progress with release 2.3c, which will include some improvements in the activation system, the ability to stitch two heightfields together seamlessly, and the ability to change and combine some of L3DT's algorithms. These features will only be included in the Professional Edition, with the Standard Edition being unchanged from release 2.3b to 2.3c (except for bug-fixes).The software development kit is also progressing well, and I hope to have a beta ready for testing early/mid next year.