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News for October 2008October 28Helpful linksHi Everyone, In the next release of L3DT there will be an 'on-line help' link in every wizard that, when clicked, will take you to the appropriate page in the L3DT on-line userguide. The link will look a little something like this:
Such help links have also been added to most non-wizard dialog boxes, such as the climate/material editors, Atlas export window, Spring export window, etc, etc. Cheerio, Aaron. October 25Changes to update manager and file pathsHi Everyone, The first developmental build of L3DT Professional following release 2.6 is now available from the Pro downloads page. This build includes some improvements to the update manager, and changes to where some files are stored, as explained below. Automatic updatesThe automatic update feature has been enabled, and the update manager will now periodically check for alerts and updates. On the occasion of the first automatic check, L3DT will ask you for permission to connect to the internet to check for updates. If you refuse, L3DT will only check for updates if you manually select the 'Help→Check for updates' menu option. However, if you allow the connection, L3DT will continue to check for updates every fortnight. Path and installer changesTo make it easier for users to access L3DT's climate/texture files and log files, the paths to these files have been changed: The resources (climate and texture) are now stored in:
Similarly, the logfiles may be found at:
These changes should make it easier for users to access these files. Furthermore, the installer now creates links to these folders in the start menu: Note that the menu has links for:
FeedbackIf you would like to comment on these changes, please drop me a line at aaron@bundysoft.com. Cheerio, Aaron. October 18 (later that day)L3DT release 2.6 ProfessionalHi Everyone, L3DT release 2.6 is now available for download in Professional and Pro for Torque flavours from here and GarageGames, respectively. In fact, it's been available for the last two or so weeks, but due to other commitments I've not been able to properly announce it until now. What's new?Release 2.6 is a major upgrade to many important components of L3DT Professional. Below I've listed the main changes from the previous stable release, which was v2.5c from March of this year. The detailed change log is also available on the release history page. Multithreading and optimisationsThe headline change for v2.6 is the massive improvements to multi-core/mosaic-map support. In particular, optimisations of the light and texture mapping algorithms have provided as much as a 25× increase in calculation speed for Quad-core systems (see here and here for benchmark results). No less important than the speed improvements are the major improvements in stability. We've now logged hundreds of hours of testing of L3DT's multi-threaded mosaic-map calculations on dual-, triple- and quad-core systems, and it works flawlessly. This means that if you have an interest in making large maps with highly-detailed textures, updating to L3DT version 2.6 will save you a lot of time! TGEA supportAll versions of L3DT now include the new Atlas2 exporter plugin, which supports both blended and unique textured Atlas generation. Also, the exporter is now accessible using the 'Atlas' button on the toolbar, shown below. Please refer to the TGEA tutorial for more information.
Spring supportThere are lots of new goodies for Spring mappers in the new Professional Edition, including:
Vista supportThe required changes have been made to allow L3DT to run properly under Vista's User Access Control (UAC) system. Extensive testing has been performed under Vista 32- and 64-bit versions, and no further compatibility issues were identified. Linux supportChanges have also been made to improve support for L3DT in Linux using the WINE compatibility layer. I and others have successfully installed and run L3DT Standard and Professional in Ubuntu 8.04. However, some users have reported (easily fixable) problems with file paths in some distributions. For more information, please refer to the L3DT in Linux page. User interface
Other changesPlease refer to the release history for the full list of changes. Downloading updates / renewing licenses
Please note that licenses for L3DT Professional have a free update period of 18 months. If you purchased an L3DT Pro license in or before March of 2007, you may now need to renew your license to use this new update. To renew your license, with a 40% discount, please contact sales@bundysoft.com and be sure to quote either:
FeedbackIf you'd like to ask a question or make a comment about this release, please do so in this forum thread. As always, I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback that you care to give. Best regards, Aaron Torpy. October 18RIP: Old Atlas pluginHi Everyone, The old Atlas plugin for 'L3DT for Torque' is now officially retired, and won't be packaged with any future releases of L3DT (i.e. post v2.6). The new all-singing and all-dancing L3DTio_Atlas2 plugin is now installed by default with all versions of L3DT. If, for some reason, you would like to use the old atlas exporter, you may request a copy by e-mailing aaron@bundysoft.com. Best regards, Aaron. October 16Duke Nukem ForeverI'll admit it; I am vaguely amused when people attempt to register for a trial license of L3DT Professional using an ostentatiously fake name like “Duke Nukem”. Kudos for trying. No soup for you! Cheerio, Aaron PS: Release 2.6 of L3DT Professional and L3DT for Torque are available for download, and have been so for the last week or so. I'll do a full announcement when I get a spare moment…possibly this weekend. October 2It begins...The launch of the v2.6 update to L3DT has begun, starting with the Standard edition (see release ann.) The Professional and L3DT for Torque editions will follow in a week or so, once I've finished writing their much lengthier release announcements, and once I'm slightly more satisfied that I haven't cocked-up anything at the last minute. Stay tuned… Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license:CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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