New and updated climates

Hi Everyone,

L3DT release 2.5b will add a few new climates and change a few old ones. New climates include 'tropical', 'demo-grass-rock-sand', 'Spring-Greenworld', 'Spring-Desertworld' and 'Spring-Mars'. The last three climates were kindly donated by Spring/L3DT mapper extraordinaire Forboding Angel. Below you will find a few screenshots and brief descriptions of said climates:

The 'tropical' climate is largely similar to the 'temperate' but uses more greenish textures:

The new 'Tropical' climate.

The 'Demo-grass-rock-sand' climate is a really stripped-down climate, which is intended to help new users get used to editing and making climates. It contains just three land types, and looks like this:

The new 'Demo-grass-rock-sand' climate.

The 'Spring-Greenworld', 'Spring-Desertworld' and 'Spring-Mars' climate was created by Forboding Angel for use with the open-source RTS game Spring. These climates have strong bump-mapping settings, which are well-suited to Spring's mainly top-down viewing angle and high sun angle. Also, since water in Spring is at a single, fixed level across the whole map, these climates use altitude ranges to define land types such as beach sand, rather than the water-dependent coefficients that are normally used (e.g. in the 'temperate' climate). This makes the attributes map calculation faster, but means the climates should not be used with multiple water levels (e.g. auto lakes).

The 'Spring-Greenworld' climate.

The 'Spring-Desertworld' climate.

The 'Spring-Mars' climate.

I've also enabled bump-mapping for the 'grass' land types in the temperate climates. This adds to the visual detail of the terrain, particularly when using very high-resolution textures (8x or more).

Bump-mapped grass in the temperate climate.

Well, that's all for today. More news tomorrow.

Cheerio, Aaron.