L3DT v2.3b release announcement

Many thanks to the beta-testers, who did a great job of stress-testing all the new features (and suggesting new ones). There have been a large number of changes from 2.3a to 2.3b, most of which are listed on the release history page. Below I have summarised the key changes.

L3DT has been split into two releases. On the downloads page you can find the installer for L3DT Standard Edition. This version includes all the commonly used features, and is intended to be sufficient for most users' needs.

For expert users and developers, there is also a Professional Edition (still in beta-release). This version includes some of the more advanced, experimental, or just plain untested features, and is available via free registration.

A break-down of features in the two versions is included on the registration page comparison page.

…is now supported. Please refer to the alpha map tutorial for more info.

There have been a great number of improvements on the file I/O front, most notably:

• A nice new export wizard, which allow you resize the map, and also split it into tiles.
• An exporter for heightfields as 16-bit PNG images.

I have discontinued native support for the TNF (terrain normals file) and LMF (light map file), both of which have been wholly superseded by the bitmap, JPEG and PNG formats. If you load an old map that contains a TNF and/or LMF, you will not be able to save the map unless you first open the file preferences dialog and select another format for the terrain normals map and/or the light map. By default, L3DT now uses JPEG for both.