News for June 2006

Hurrah!

It's been nearly three months since the first beta-release of L3DT 2.4, and I'm proud to announce that it is finally ready for public consumption. Many thanks go to the cast of beta-testers for their assistance and patience with debugging, and also for their numerous suggestions for improvements.

Most of the changes since the last 'stable' release (v2.3d) are recorded in the release announcements for v2.4 beta1, beta2, beta3 and RC1. Here is a quick round-up:

• Heightfields
  • Improved erosion routines (more realistic, slightly slower).
• Climates, light-mapping and textures
  • There is a climate editor, so hacking climate files is now unnecessary.
  • Bump-mapped lighting is now more accurate, and works better on tilted terrain (e.g. cliff-faces).
  • Land types may now have an arbitrary number of textures and bump-maps (prev. limit was two textures and two bump-maps per type). This allows much greater detail in high-res textures (see 27/May examples).
  • Land types may now have strata-layers.
• File input and output
  • L3DT now stores map data in XML-based project files (.proj) and map definition files (.def.xml), replacing the text-based mgf and def formats.
  • RAW import and export of the heightfield is available in several data-modes (consult RAW specs page).
  • The y-axis of image exports can be flipped in L3DT automatically (using file→preferences→[format]→options→Invert Y).
  • The GLScene HTF format is now supported for mosaic heightfields (export only).

In addition to these changes, there have been innumerable bug-fixes and other tweaks to the algorithms or user-interface.

The L3DT Standard Edition is available for free on the downloads page.

Licenses for L3DT Professional Edition will go on sale on Monday the 3rd of July at a cost of $25 USD per-person or $60 USD for a multi-user license (up to five users). Evaluation licenses will still be available on request after this date, but the lifetime of new keys has been reduced from six to three months. Users who have previously registered for 365-day or 180-day trial licenses may download the new version (from the pro downloads page, consult your registration e-mail), and freely use it until the expiry of those keys.

The next big thing on the cards is a better map-editor interface (long overdue!), and support for editing the heightfield, attributes map and texture map. The map-display may also be re-done too.

In any case, I'll be talking a break from development for the next little while to rest my weary brain and focus on some other 'real-world' commitments (eg. work). In this time I will, of course, continue to provide bug-fixes if they are required.

Please leave feedback on the community forums.

We will miss your good humour Tony, your helpfulness without limit, your honesty, your friendship and company. You made the world that much more interesting a place to live, not by trying, but by simply being. Friday lunchtimes, flat batteries, strong, hot lattes, wrong extensions, lost packets, funny e-mails, ugg boots at work, commie rants from a fellow traveller, and let's not forget perl. These things, and so many more than I dare think of now, will forever remind me of a dear colleague, and a dear friend, dearly missed.

Farewell Tony, may you rest in peace.

I've uploaded what will hopefully be the last pre-release of L3DT v2.4. This version has a few more bug-fixes compared to beta3, re-re-jigged erosion, and better default settings for the design/inflate terrain generator. I've also changed the texture size limits for the Standard Edition (max is 4x texture res, or 2048×2048 pixels).

If you find any bugs in v2.4 RC1, please let me know as soon as possible.

Cheers, Aaron.

PS: The RSS feed for this news weblog system now works properly, and can be found at:

http://www.bundysoft.com/news/blogfeed.php

Back in February I nominated the 1st of July to be the release-date for L3DT 2.4, which is eleven days from now. It looks like the release version is ready to go now, but I'm going to keep to that date anyway, just so that I can say I was exactly on-schedule (it doesn't happen often).

Sooo…not much to do now, except maybe indulge in some navel-gazing¹⁾. Selling software. Selling my hobby. It's a bit of an eerie feeling. When I started this project, way back when, L3DT was just a little program to make a map for an RTS game I was developing (or rather, thinking about developing). At that point I didn't consider the possibility that L3DT would ever be released to the public²⁾, much less sold to the public. It did what I wanted, and nothing more. It was really ugly, and damn-near impossible to use if you were not, in fact, the programmer himself.

Now it's a product. It has to do what other people want it to do, in the way they expect it be done. It has to have an intelligible, no, intuitive, user-interface. It has to check entered data, it has to work on other computers, it has to have sensible documentation, and it cannot ever crash. In fact, it shouldn't even throw errors. A warning might be acceptable, but not an error. Lord no. You don't pay money for errors. It can be quite a responsibility to meet those expectations, particularly so when it's your hobby, not your job.

Wow, that makes the whole thing sound miserable and unrewarding. The reality is quite the opposite. Delivering a program that people use, that people like to use, is just an awesome feeling. I honestly get a vicarious kick out of seeing what other people do with L3DT. Making their own games, making their own worlds, making art, having fun, being creative, pursuing whatever their hobby happens to be. Compared to that warm-and-fuzzy feeling, the annoyance of having to 'fix' a bug that's not a bug, or write some bizarre file-exporter, or even re-do a dialog that's a bit hard to use, is utterly trivial. It's a good deal for me, and I shan't complain.

Cheerio, Aaron.

PS: I nearly forgot - The very first of the 6-month trial keys for L3DT Pro will expire on the 9th, so this release won't be a moment too soon.

The third and final beta-release of L3DT v2.4 is available for download. As usual, a summary of the changes is provided on the release history page, and a description follows:

The main focus of this release was to fix bugs in preparation for the final L3DT 2.4, and indeed there were many bugs to fix:

• 'File→Import→Design map' (would crash).
• 'File→Import→Heightfield' (JPEG not available).
• 'Operations→Design map→Generate from HF' (would crash).
• 'Operations→Design map→Modify parameters' (would crash).
• 'Operations→Active map→Split to mosaic' (would crash for heightfield).
• Fixed 'per pixel land types' texture algorithm (would crash for multiple climates).
• 'File→Save' (would sometimes throw an error relating to the water-body list).
• RAW import (was broken, but I can't remember how).
• Numerous fixes to the climate editor (generally not crash-worthy).

Further patches may be issued over the coming fortnight to address any bugs that may be identified by users.

As previewed last month, the bump-mapping and texturing algorithms have been improved to give greater realism at high texture resolutions. Pretty screenshots of this may be found in the gallery, and more are on the way. I will, at some point, update the algorithms pages to explain how the new system works (but not right now).

I've added a new 'desert' climate and revised the 'artic' and 'temperate' climates. These aren't the finalised production-versions, but they're pretty close to what you can expect from L3DT release 2.4.

You may also notice that I've removed the 'arid', 'temperate (deluxe)' and 'temperate (basic)' climates. The reasons for this were:

• 'arid' needed substantial work to bring it up to the standard of the other climates.
• 'temperate (deluxe)' was superfluous, as the standard 'temperate' now looks much better (it has 25 land types, 15 of which are grass).
• 'temperate (basic)' was dropped because I ran out of time.

I will try to re-build 'temperate (basic)' for v2.4, but I make no promises as to the other climates.

In previous releases, climate files were located in [Resources\Climates] and textures were in [Resources\Textures]. This arrangement made it difficult for users to copy and re-distribute climates, so it's been changed for beta3. Now textures may be in the same directory as the climate file, so you can easily zip-up and e-mail a climate, textures and all.

The down-side of these changes is that the file-paths in old climates are broken. If you have any custom-made climates, you will need to manually re-set the correct file paths. While you're at it, it might be a good idea to create a new directory for each climate (see the examples provided) and copy the relevant textures into those directories, thereby making your climates readily 'portable'.

In addition to these changes, the weighting of the texture-blending and bump-mapping system have been re-defined, so things might not look exactly as they did previously. Similarly, the perlin-noise frequency of each land type is now relative to the size of a heightfield pixel, rather than 1/16th of it (as in beta2). Over the next week or so I will revise the user-guide to reflect these changes and explain exactly what all the numbers mean.

The next release will be the 'final' L3DT 2.4 in about two weeks time. It is highly unlikely that any new features will be added at this stage, so the only changes between beta3 and final should be fixes for any bugs still in beta3, plus a few more climates.

As foreshadowed in January, the Professional Edition will no-longer be free for L3DT v2.4. Licenses will be available at cost of $25 (US dollars), with free upgrades provided up to 18 months after purchase. The accepted payment method will be PayPal.

Evaluation licenses will still be available on request, as before, but the lifetime of such keys has been reduced to 60 days (from 180 days). These changes do not apply retrospectively, so older 180- or 365-day keys are still valid.

Please leave your comments and suggestions in the community forum.