News for January 2005

L3DT The changes include bug-fixes, user-interface improvements, and some modifications to the heightfield generation routine (particularly erosion). See the release history page for details.

L3DTVi2 Stuart Gooding has added a vertex shader program for L3DTVi2 that blends the detail-map at two spatial resolutions, giving improved close-ups (see screenshots below). Also, in response to some user-feedback the camera controls have been revised and the 'Cg.dll' dependency has been removed.

Pretty foreground in L3DTVi2 thanks to detail map.

The source code for L3DTVi2 is available on the downloads page.

What's next? This release effectively clears-the-decks of all the small jobs over which I had been procrastinating. The next release will focus on the big job over which I had been procrastinating; namely the full mosaic-map re-implementation.

Website news The tutorial and algorithms pages have been updated to reflect the current version. The addresses of these pages have been changed in some cases, and consequently deep-links from external sites will be broken (sorry to those affected).

It has been reported that L3DT 2.2a and 2.2b tend to crash on Win2k machines. Another problem, which I fear is closely related, is that re-drawing of the active map may be skipped following some operations (eg exporting maps). At a guess I'd say these relate to the introduction of worker-threads in 2.2a. I'll take a crack at these problems when I get back from holidays.

Also, it looks like release 2.2b had a bug in the HTF-writing routine that caused random inversions of axes. For those concerned, a patched-up exe may be downloaded from here. This version also includes some minor changes intended for release 2.2c, for which I will write documentation at a later date.

I'm planning on releasing L3DT 2.2c in late Jan or early Feb, by which time I hope to have gathered up all the loose threads (sorry 'bout the pun). Until then, toodles.