L3DT Users' Community

Hi Everyone,

I've uploaded my first attempt at a 3D rendering plugin for L3DT, 'Sapphire'. It's still a little rough, so please don't bother with bug reports or feature requests just yet.

By the way, are there any MSVC-equipped C++ programmers, familiar with bare OpenGL and preferably ROAM tessellation algorithms, who are interested in collaborating on this? If so, please let me know.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Edit: I just fixed the troublesome bug in the ROAM algorithm, so I don't really need help with that any more. Nonetheless, I'm still happy to collaborate. I think this is now sufficiently OK to be included with the L3DT installer, so it's going into the next release.

Edit #2: I've uploaded an update that works better with large maps (8192x8192 heightfields). Now for the mosaics...

Sapphire plugin looks at a hardcoded path for Textures...

CL3DTio_FIApp::LoadMapFile error
- File 'D:\Bundysoft\Releases\L3DT 2.5\Common\L3DTVi2\skybox\posz.jpg' not found

CExtDLL::LoadMapFile error
- call to DLL function 'LoadMapFile' failed

CMapGroup::LoadMapFile2 error
- error loading file

CsSkybox::LoadTextures error:
- cannot load texture

Hi byteasc,

Whoops, sorry. Update uploaded.

Best regards,
Aaron.

Hi All,

I forgot to mention above; Sapphire is now included in L3DT Pro as of v2.5 RC2, and there's a handy - albeit ugly - '3D' button on the toolbar that launches it. Bug reports welcome!

Cheers,
Aaron.

Yep, JUST grabbed RC2.1 and noticed it was included and worked fine

Also just got l3dt_atlas plugin compiled for TGEA so fooling with it :p

Hi All,

I've got the start of a 3D editor going in the rendering plugin. Here are some piccies:

Firstly, the unmodified terrain:



I've then activated the raise/lower tool. The blue sphere indicates the position and radius of the raise/lower tool (it follows the mouse). The brush size is changed with the scroll-wheel:



To raise/lower terrain, left-click and drag up or down:



Using the same map, I put in another mountain range (in left/middle of background):



I've a little more polishing to do, but it should be ready for general testing/use within a week or so.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Looks great! Thank you, Aaron!

So it begins

Hi All,

I've uploaded L3DT Professional 2.5 RC5 to the downloads page, which contains the updated Sapphire plugin with the heightfield editor. The controls are listed in this PDF.

Feedback welcome!

PS: One problem I know already is that the tool position does not exactly match the mouse cursor position. This is because I'm using a quick hack to convert from viewport to world coordinates. I'll fix this up in the next update, probably using the gluUnProject function.

Edit: gluUnProject has indeed fixed the mouse cursor positionioning problem. The fix will be included in the next update.

Hey aaron,

I recently bought L3DT in order to use it for TGEA for a game a friend and I are making (outside of my regular work which I use Torque in as well, and wanted to show my co-workers the program some). Are you still interested in having people collaborate on the Sapphire renderer? I'm doing some stuff with a modified ROAM algorithm myself. If I can get what I have working in Sapphire I would be willing to hand it over as well (spherical ROAM).

Also I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share how you set up the editing?

Last time I looked at L3TD you didn't have heightmap editing in saphire. It's a great addition. Now that it exists, I am considering buying the pro version.

I saw image drape on your to do list for saphire. Do you have any idea when/if that will happen? (soon or far in the future?) It is one of the features that I would find really usefull.

Hi Martinloki,

I saw image drape on your to do list for saphire. Do you have any idea when/if that will happen? (soon or far in the future?)

It's difficult to predict when this feature will be ready. It's not a particularly hard thing to implement, but there are several other features on the dev plan with higher priority at the moment. I would hope I'd get to it before the middle of 2008, but I make no guarantees.

Cheerio,
Aaron.