News for January 2006

Some time late last night I made a few small but potentially rather useful additions to L3DT, so rather than hold back I thought I'd pop-out an unexpected and unscheduled update. If you're feeling impatient, you can find a brief list of changes on the release history page; otherwise, you may benefit from the somewhat more lengthy descriptions below. As usual, the installers are on their respective downloads pages.

I've added the 'Operations→Heightfield→Generate preview' option, which makes a quick low-detail version of the heightfield. It's 1/4th the resolution, around 4× faster, but still looks pretty-much the same (compare regular and preview). The idea is that this feature will make it easier to iteratively design a heightfield, as you can rapidly (and semi-reliably) assess the impact of your changes on the final heightfield. There is likely to be much tweaking and re-jigging of this feature in the next few releases, so please feel free to send your feedback my way (preferrably via the users' forum). File format stuff

Though had previously avowed not to add any more file format support to L3DT until I had finished the software development kit, I've acquiesced to popular demands and made the following additions:

• More RAW file options, including:
  • 8-bit, stretched over the 0→255 value range.
  • 16-bit unsigned, stretched over the 0→65,535 value range.
  • 16-bit unsigned, spanning 0 to alt range, truncated to metres.
  • 16-bit signed integer, from min value to max value, truncated to metres.
  • 32-bit floating-point values, in metres.
• Export-only support for mosaic RAW heightfields.
• Native support for the PNG image format for the attributes map (in 16-bit greyscale mode), which is now the default format because it's lossless compression saves space.

I've added the somewhat cryptic 'Operations→Active map→Duplicate tile borders' option, which fixes a relatively undocumented problem with 3D-renderers when handling tiled data. To cut a long story short, it re-packs each mosaic tile with one extra row and column of data from the neighbouring tiles, so that the eastern-most pixel in one tile is the same as the western-most pixel in the next tile to the east, and likewise for the north/south axis. This is required by some implementations of tiled renderers, though not L3DTVi2. Nor is it required for L3DT, and so it's not a default mode. More documentation will follow at a later date.

There was a bug in the file preferences dialog box, only when accessed through the export wizard, that meant that your settings weren't being applied properly. This has been fixed.

The users' gallery is back up and running again, following a little blunder in which an upgrade of the community forum broke the gallery login. Please feel free to drop-by and cop a squizz of the latest offerings.

I've also gone to town adding content to the useful links page of the users' wiki. There are lots of links to terrain software, programming resources, data resource sites, and other handy miscellany. If you think I've missed something, please feel free to login and add it yourself.

Also in the wiki; I've started a page for users' tips and tricks, where everyone may jot down little bits of wisdom they've gained vis-a-vis using L3DT. There's nothing much there yet, but I hope that will change shortly (wink wink).

Comments, questions and suggestions regarding this release are welcome on the users' forum.

Bump-mapped lighting is now available in L3DT Professional. Here is a screenshot to whet your appetite:

Each land type may have their own unique bump-maps, which are specified in the land type definitions within the climate files. So far I have only upgraded the 'temperate' and 'arctic' climates to include bump-mapping, with the rest to follow at a later date. Here, by the way, is an image of the arctic climate with 8× light-mapping and textures:

While some benefits may be observed for regular low-resolution light- and texture-maps, the best results from bump-mapping are achieved at 8× resolution or higher.

Well, there have been some very fruity happenings with L3DT 2.3c, including crashes, dialog boxes rendering at the wrong size (deja vu), ini files haven't been loading, map sizes have been lost, and maps have been saving in strange places (or not at all). Best of all, most of the faults have been both intermittent and system-dependent, which has made debugging so much more fun.

Anyhow, my thanks go to the members of the users' community who pointed out the bugs. I think most of the bad stuff has been fixed now, so I've uploaded a new installer (for L3DT Pro, only), and I recommend all registered users to update as soon as is convenient. I'll update the Standard installer some time next week.

Googlebot crawled by last night, which means that the site is now properly searchable. Most pages have a Google search box on the lower-left sidebar.

I've updated the light-mapping and texture-mapping tutorials to L3DT release 2.3c, as well as the corresponding algorithms pages. Additionally, there are some important tutorial addenda in the users' wiki, which will be included in the official tutorials shortly have now been included in the user-guide. These include how to make a skybox for L3DTVi2 in Terragen, how to make a climate (unfinished), and using the image overlay function.

There is now an examples download page, where you can get complete maps, alternate skyboxes for L3DTVi2, L3DT map batch definitions, and miscellaneous other stuff. There's not much there at the moment, but more will be added soon.

I've updated the useful links page in the wiki, adding a bunch of links to other software, bits of code, etc. If you can think of something else that should be listed there, then please login and do so. The users' projects page is also in need of some lovin', so please feel free to add links to and descriptions of your projects.

Due to popular demand I've rushed L3DT release 2.3c forward a few days, so here it is! Judging by past form, I've probably forgotten something and will need to issue an update in two days time anyhow. Nevertheless, there is much to discuss with this new release:

From a user's perspective, the main changes are the improved high resolution texture- and light-mapping in the Professional edition of L3DT. Additionally, stability and usability has improved thanks to a number of bug fixes. One of my main goals for this release was also to prepare L3DT Professional for commercial release in the middle of 2006, which meant finalising the activation key system. A brief overview of all these changes can be found on the release history page.

The texture- and light-mapping routines have been improved in L3DT Professional (no changes here for L3DT Standard). The texture mapping algorithm can now calculate the land types per texel, which gives much sharper (read: less washed out) textures at land type interfaces such as grass/rock (see example). This is slower, however, so it's not the default option. Also, high resolution light mapping is now possible, and gives sharper shadow definition for high res textures (see example).

This release addresses some of the long-standing bugs in L3DT (such as the MRU list in the 'files' menu), as well as some of the more recent ones introduced during the 22-or-so updates of L3DT Pro (such as breakage of the delete water-body tool, wrapping heightfields, non-square perlin maps, etc). There have also been numerous bug fixes for the activation key processing module, which had a habit of failing when it wasn't supposed to, often in quite a spectacular fashion. There are still some kinks to be worked out, but now at least it should crash in a nice way.

You can download the free Standard Edition from the downloads page, and registered users can download the Professional Edition from the address provided with their activation keys. If you'd like to register for an evaluation version of L3DT Pro, please follow the procedure described on the downloads page.

As mentioned above, the next major update to L3DT will be release 2.4 in the middle of 2006, and this will be a commercial release. The standard edition will remain free (including for commercial use), but the professional version will cost of the order of $25 USD (still to be finalised). A 90-day evaluation version of L3DT Pro will also be available via free registration, like the previous beta programme, so you will be able to try the fully-featured version before you decide to buy (or not).

Feature-wise, L3DT 2.4 Professional will include further improvements to the light mapping module, including the ability to apply individual bump maps to different land types for better visual detail. Another key feature will be the ability to combine different L3DT operations to build your own algorithms. I'm yet to finalise the user interface for this, but I may settle for a simple scripting engine input in the first instance.

My warmest thanks go out to the 200-or-so participants in the beta programme, who have been of great assistance in debugging and refining L3DT Professional. I've closed the door, metaphorically speaking, on the beta programme; instead I will be issuing to prospective registrants 6-month evaluation keys, which should last until L3DT 2.4. All current beta keys have been automagically converted to a 12-month evaluation keys, dated from today.

The documentation hasn't been updated since the original release of 2.3b last year, but will be updated in time for release 2.4. In the mean-time, I will be adding corrections and updates to the addenda section of the users' wiki new documentation wiki.

Some users may still experience problems in activating or using L3DT 2.3c Professional. These problems will be addressed in the minor updates leading up to release 2.4. We're getting there, slowly.

Otherwise L3DT is looking pretty bug-free (fingers crossed).

Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the users' forum.