News for November 2005

If you would like a really easy way to keep track of what's happening in the forums or amongst the users' community, you might like to get yourself a news aggregator (eg. Feedreader, Google Reader) and subscribe to the following RSS feeds:

• http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/rss.php (forums)
• http://www.bundysoft.com/coppermine/rss.php (galleries)
• http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/feed.php (wiki)

Your aggregator will then check for updates automatically, and highlight any new posts/images/articles added since your last perusal. You'll never have to go digging through forum threads again!

Please note there are currently no RSS feed for this news page or for the home page, but these will be added in good time.

I'm so excited about this I just had to use the funky blue news item title that I normally reserve for major releases¹⁾. In a veritable explosion of PHP, I can now offer to the L3DT users' community a brand-new forum, gallery, and wiki. Please think of these as your personal playgrounds.

To post images in the gallery or articles/files/whatever in the wiki, you first need to create an account in the forums. They all use the same data-base, so you don't need to create separate accounts for each. However, there are still some configuration issues to be sorted out, as described in this forum post. I also need to do a bit of template customisation to better-integrate the navigation of these systems with the main website and one another.

The mailing list will remain in operation for those who wish to use it, but I suspect it will slide into disuse in the face of this, dare I say it, WEB 2.0 ONSLAUGHT!!!!1111

For those that are interested, the forum uses phpBB2, the gallery is Coppermine, and the wiki is DokuWiki. I can't praise these packages enough; they were very easy to install (which is good, since I'm a day-one PHP n00b), and linking Coppermine and DokuWiku to the phpBB user database took a couple of minutes apiece. I'll let you know how the rest of the integration goes.

There is a new update available for L3DT Professional that includes two new features:

1. You can change the design-map parameters - such as erosion, lakes, roughness, etc - after you've generated or imported the design map. The menu option for this is 'Operations→Design map→Modify parameters…'.
2. An image can be 'draped' over the main map display as a semi-transparent overlay. This is intended to help users create design-maps by using images of contour maps (etc.) as templates or guides. The menu option for this is 'View→Image overlay…'.

Both of these features are still undocumented, and should be considered to have 'beta' status. They will be included in the Standard Edition in a month or two.

Registered users can download the update from the regular place…wink wink, nudge nudge.

I've recently updated the style of the website, adding a new menu to the left-hand-side of each page that replaces the old silvery-looking menu that can still be seen on old news page. If you experience any strange page navigation problems or find broken-links with this new system, please e-mail me at aaron@bundysoft.com and I will fix things forthwith.

There was a bug in the export wizard that messes-up the map data when you resize a heightfield for export. This has been fixed, and I've updated both the Standard and Professional installers.

Just for the record, the current version is 2.3b Rev. 17, and the release-date is 08-Nov-05.

A password is now required to access the L3DT Professional download site. If you're a registered user, please send me an e-mail to receive the password.

I've finally splashed-out and bought some real web-hosting for L3DT. Welcome to www.bundysoft.com, a domain named in part after a cat that slept on my feet, hunted rabbits, and dribbled when happy.

In other news, Go Daddy have insanely low prices for web-hosting.