News for April 2006

I was a tad sleepy when I wrote the release announcement for v2.4 beta1, and consequently I seem to have forgotten to mention a few useful morsels of information. Here is one of them:

You can now edit the placement of land-types in the attributes map using your favourite image editor. Said differently, you can paint land types. To do this you need to use the 'colour-mapped' PNG format, which is activated by:

1. Select 'File→Preferences' in the menu.
2. Select 'Attributes map→PNG'.
3. Hit both the 'use format' and 'make default' buttons.
4. Click on the 'Options…' button.
5. Double-click on the 'ColourMapped = false' item (to set it to true).
6. Close the options dialog and file-preferences dialog using the 'OK' buttons.

This will save the attributes map in the same colour-scheme as it appears on the screen in L3DT (example). However, this must be used with care, as it makes it very easy for you to corrupt the contents of your attributes map. The following rules should be observed:

1. Only use colours already defined in the map (!).
2. Never JPEG an attributes map (will violate the first rule unless lossless compression is used).

Furthermore, there will be problems if multiple land types share the same display colour, as the PNG-loader will pick the first land type with a matching colour. User beware!

Anyhoo, I'm sure I've forgotten something else, so stay tuned for Things I forgot to mention (part 2).

The first beta-release of L3DT v2.4 is available for public testing.

The full list of changes is provided on the release history page. Of these, the important ones are:

• A climate editor.
• Numerous file format changes, including:
  • MGF is now PROJ.
  • CLI is now CLI.XML.
  • DEF is now DEF.XML.
  • RAW has more options, and can be imported.
  • PNG has more options.
  • BT now supports lat/lon coordinates, and geo-ref data is preserved.
  • There's now the option to flip the y-axis in most image formats.
• A walk-through guide is provided in the application.
• Several steps in map-building have been streamlined.
• Countless bug-fixes.

The scripting engine intended for the final release of L3DT v2.4 is not enabled in this beta, but will be included in another beta-release May/June.

If you use the unregistered Standard Edition, you can get the installer here. If you've registered for the trial of the Professional Edition, the download details were provided in the registration info e-mail you received. If you haven't registered, but would like to, please follow these instructions.

Please note that this beta-release will not affect your current installation of L3DT.

A complete user-guide to the new version is provided in the all-new documentation wiki. An off-line copy of this documentation is not provided with the installer, but will be for the final release of v2.4.

Please post suggestions, comments or questions on this thread in the community forum.