L3DT development blog
Large 3D terrain generator

November 25

Recent happenings

Hi Everyone,

Development has been a little slow for the past few months due to other commitments, but I'm starting to get back into the job of preparing L3DT for the next release, which now seems more likely to be early 2017 rather than late 2016.

In other news:

At the end of July this year, Kagi.com ceased trading. Until that time, I had been using Kagi as one of the payment options in the store (along with PayPal). The store now only accepts payment by PayPal. License renewal discount, which had previously been handled through Kagi's discount coupon system, has now been re-implemented on this site using PayPal.

As of L3DT 16.11 build 1, L3DT will now check at startup whether other sessions of L3DT are running, and if so, will give you the choice of aborting the new session or terminating the old one. This change was made to prevent the corruption of settings files that may occur when running multiple sessions of L3DT at the same time.

Best regards, Aaron.

2016/11/25 13:10 · aaron
2016/11/25 13:12 · aaron

May 24

Fixes for heightfield tools, and other things

Hi Everyone,

on the Pro downloads page now, you will find L3DT Professional 16.05 developmental build 5 (64-bit), which fixes a few problems with the heightfield tools in the Sapphire 3D viewer/editor:

  • There was a vertical offset of around 25 pixels between the position of the mouse cursor on the screen and the position of the 3D brush tool on the terrain (see bug report).
  • The point grab tool initially lowered the terrain a long way, before allowing the user to raise/lower the terrain.
  • The 'undo' feature did not properly revert changes when editing with large brush sizes near to the eastern edge of the terrain. This particularly affected the bulldozer, leveller, and level at tools.

These problems have now been fixed.

Additionally, the user interface for the bulldozer tool has been updated a little, and now shows where the terrain will be raised (blue lines), and where it will be lowered (red lines):

New bulldozer tool display

Lastly, I fixed a fault in the installer that prevented a number of menu scripts from installing properly. These scripts now enable the following menu commands:

  • 'Operations→Heightfield→Add height', for adding (or subtracting) a uniform amount of height for the whole map.
  • 'Operations→Heightfield→Multiply', for scaling the height values of the heightfield.
  • 'Operations→Heightfield→Invert', for inverting the height range so that low becomes high, and vice versa.
  • 'Operations→Heightfield→Clamp', for re-scaling the height of the map to fit between a user-defined minimum and maximum height.
  • 'Operations→Heightfield→Generate contour maps', for generating a contour map image from the heightfield.
  • 'Operations→Alpha maps→Clear alpha maps', for clearing all alpha maps in the project.
  • 'Extensions→Sapphire→Sapphire debug script', for performing diagnostics on the Sapphire 3D renderer.

As always, please use use the forum to report any faults or make suggestions, or contact aaron@bundysoft.com.

Best regards, Aaron.

2016/05/24 09:18 · aaron
2016/05/24 11:57 · aaron

May 13

Counting error messages in L3DT

G'day,

In case you were wondering, there are something like 7587 different checks in L3DT that will detect error cases and throw messages to the event log window. There is a further 9351 error checks in all the plugins, and 407 in scripts, giving a grand total of 17339 different error messages I've written for L3DT.

[Actually, the real number is a little higher, as I've ignored messages that bypass the event log and go either straight to modal message box, or get quietly written in the log file. You get the idea, though.]

In related news, I worked out how to write a script using ZeoScript that recursively searches a directory for files of given types, and then counts the instances of a given string in those files. Easy to do in bash, not quite so easy in ZeoScript, but not impossible.

Cheerio, Aaron.

2016/05/13 12:56 · aaron
2016/05/13 12:57 · aaron

May 10

Finalisation wizard

Hi Everyone,

If you're making large maps in L3DT, the calculations can run for a long time (for example, this took 10 days). Since these calculations are usually running unattended and finish when no-one is around / awake, I thought it might be nice to have a way to automatically save the map project when it's finished, and put the system to sleep. Behold, the latest build of L3DT Pro (16.05 build 2, on the Pro downloads page now) includes the Finalisation wizard:

This wizard, which is enabled by checking the 'Finalisation' checkbox in the Calculation queue wizard, allows you to run any number or combination of custom actions after the map calculations finish, including:

  • Saving the project
  • Running a script or graph
  • Playing a sound
  • Putting the system to sleep

More actions may be added in the future, depending on users' requests.

The user guide for the finalisation wizard is available here, and may also be accessed by clicking on the 'On-line help' link in the wizard itself.

If you have any suggestions or find any problems, please feel free to contact me at aaron@bundysoft.com.

Best regards, Aaron.

2016/05/10 04:29 · aaron
2016/05/10 04:31 · aaron

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