News for May 2005

Are we there yet? No, but we're making good time. The list of things to do is short and getting shorter.

Scripting engine My main activity at the moment is expanding the vocabulary of the scripting engine lexer. However, the scripter will only be used in L3DT 2.3 for some internal operations; there won't be a user interface. Thus I only need to implement a small subset of the command library. This part is going well.

Debugging I've been giving L3DT 2.3 a thorough workout, and I think I've caught most of the bugs. However, the number of changes between 2.3-beta and 2.3-full is pretty big, so I expect some bugs may yet be hiding in the rafters. Mosaic water flooding is still a problem.

Tutorial I've nearly finished the tutorial re-write for L3DT 2.3. It will feature a much-improved 'getting started' section for the beginners. The updated tutorial will be posted when L3DT 2.3 is released.

Rendering large maps in L3DTVi2 L3DTVi2 is living up to it's potential. On the gallery page I've put some screenshots of L3DTVi2 rendering an 8k2 mosaic heightfield with a 16k2 mosaic texture. That's a big data set for real-time rendering!

On the downloads page you will find a new version of L3DTVi2, the real-time 3D viewer for L3DT. The purpose of this update was largely to fix the compatibility problems with L3DT 2.3 beta and the up-coming 2.3 full release. However, there have been some other nice additions:

• Support for mosaic heightfields and textures.
• A simple water texture.
• A new and improved skybox.
• Slightly modified controls (see tutorial).

The new source code is also available on the downloads page. It is written in Delphi, using GLScene.

I've fixed the map group file loader for L3DT 2.3 so that it will be fully backwards compatible with L3DT 2.2 files. I had previously suggested that some settings would be lost in the conversion, but this will not be the case.

I've been playing around with Terragen to make a new skybox for L3DTVi2. Whaddaya think?

L3DTVi2 screenshot with new skybox

There are more screenshots in the gallery.

Gigapixel heightfields:

For a stress-test of L3DT's tile caching system I generated a 32k×32k pixel heightfield. Without erosion, it took nearly 5 hours (AMD XP2600). With erosion, it was a bit over 17 hours. No problems were encountered.

Progress report:

I've updated the to-do list again. The last few items for L3DT 2.3 are proving difficult, but not insurmountably so. The release date is uncertain, but some time in June seems as good a guess as any.

I got, umm, a little 'code-happy' when adding a perlin heightfield generator and…well…it ended up like this: I've completely re-written the internal structures used to store map generation settings, replacing structs with a dynamic list class, with named members and runtime type checking. It's really nice. These changes will make customised algorithms (scheduled for L3DT 2.4) a whole lot easier to implement.

On the down-side, I've had to change the map group file format again (for what, the 5th time now?). Will this effect backwards compatibility? Not really, you'll still be able to load the old maps, but the settings (such as the 'Sea/Land' or 'Erosion') will be lost, meaning you won't be able to re-generate the map. I may yet be able to fix this, too.

I've also rewritten just about every dialog box to fit with the new 'wizard' template (eg. light mapping).