News for May 2008

Hi All,

I've finally taken the leap and upgraded my C++ compiler. Assuming nothing goes too far awry this time (unlike last time), the next release of L3DT will be built with MSVC9, along with any plugins that are upgraded between now and then. As far as I can tell, this change won't require all plugins to be recompiled, but I'll do some more tests just to be sure.

Cheerio, Aaron.

Hi All,

Today I've been experimenting with a texture painting brush in Sapphire. First things first, here's a screenshot:

Using the new texture brush to paint snow caps on mountains.

To paint the texture, this brush works on the attributes map in the exact same way as the current attributes map brush. The difference is that after changing the attributes map, it goes on to re-generate the affected area in the texture map, and update the texture displayed in Sapphire.

One advantage of this system is that if you re-generate the texture in L3DT after using the texture brush, your changes to the texture won't be wiped-out, since they're baked onto the attributes map from which the texture is generated. The down-side is that the brush has to do a large number of calculations per brushstroke, and so it's currently quite laggy. However, I think I'll be able to improve the speed somewhat, as there are some inefficiencies in the way the texture is re-generated, as the system was not designed for real-time texture editing.

Also, I should mention that there are some artefacts in the way Sapphire displays the updated textures, including temporarily darkened squares when using mosaic textures (due to load lag), and apparently non-updated areas when using non-mosaic textures (due to mipmaps not being updated after changes).

Anyway, the unfinished-but-workable brush will be included in the next developmental build, which will be released in the next few days or so.

Cheerio, Aaron.