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L3DT v2.6 release announcementDate: 18th of October 2008 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. 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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