News for April 2008

Hi All,

This is a quick rundown of recent events:

• A new developmental build is available (L3DT 2.5c build 10.)
• L3DT Pro now supports user mode in Vista.
• The network communications plugins are coming along nicely (can send maps and run some calculations remotely.)
• It is now possible to generate selected areas of some maps (normals and texture), albeit using script commands. A nice user interface for this will be coming in the next release.
• The plugin API now supports a 'variant' data type, which is useful for polymorphic function arguments (API update not yet released, but coming soon.)
• The ZeoScript plugin has had a fairly major update, and now supports string manipulation, casting, some boolean logic, a (very) little amount of algebra, more input and output functions, and local-scope variables (finally!). Further updates are being planned.
• The light map sequence plugin has had a minor facelift.
• The old l3dt_atlas plugin has been marked for removal from the installer (will take effect within a month or so, unless someone says otherwise.)

Cheerio, Aaron.

After several frustrating hours of messing around, I've finally got L3DT's new (and unreleased) network server and network client plugins sending maps between one-another. This is the first step towards having a networked render-farm system, which is one of the nice features I'm working on for L3DT release 2.6. If all goes well (which it seldom does with networks), this feature should be ready for beta-testing in a month or two. There is still much to do.

Cheerio, Aaron.

In a belated concession to Windows Vista, the directory that L3DT uses to store climates and materials will move from:

C:\Program files\Bundysoft\L3DT [version]\Resources\Climates\

to (WinVista):

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Bundysoft\L3DT\[version]\Resources\Climates\

or (WinXP/Win2K):

C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application data\Bundysoft\L3DT\[version]\Resources\Climates\

The reason for this change is, of course, that programs running under Vista's user-level privileges can't write files to Program Files, or any directory contained therein. This means that L3DT could not modify climates or materials without being run in administrator mode, which is unnecessary and undesirable. This change should have no adverse affects other than some mild surprise and/or confusion for users who don't know where to look for their climate, material or texture files.

Oh yes, this also means that on multi-user computers, L3DT must be installed for each user. This should not pose a problem for most users, but it's possible that it could prove inconvenient in multi-user environments (e.g. computer labs). There may be some work-arounds, however, so if you find yourself inconvenienced please e-mail me.

Cheerio, Aaron.

Update: This change was included with L3DT Pro build 2.5.3.9, released on the 6th of April 2008. — aaron 2008/04/06 04:12