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Afraid to upgrade...

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Afraid to upgrade...

Postby Forboding Angel » Mon Jul 17, 2006 9:46 pm

Ok, I have 2.3d exactly the way I want it now. Have a lot of climates that I've written and look kick ass.

My fear is upgrading. Is migrating very difficult? Or am I looking at spending a week just to get mkself back on track?

I plan to buy regardless of whether I use it or not, Just kinda wanna know ahead of time.
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Re: Afraid to upgrade...

Postby Aaron » Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:37 am

Hi Forboding Angel,

Firstly, you can download and install v2.4 alongside your current v2.3d without conflict. By default, each new version will install in a separate directory. This means you can try it out without ruining your current setup. Also, your evaluation key will work with v2.4 until it expires in late November (you were on the old 1-year beta-key scheme), so there's no need to purchase or re-register to try out the new version.

Okay, as for the migration. It definitely won't take weeks, but depending on the number and complexity of your climates, it might take the better-part of an hour. The good news is that I haven't made any breaking-changes to the climate calculation, so you won't have to root around with BaseProb, GradCoeff, etc. The bad news is that I did make breaking-changes to the texture system, and you'll need to re-set all the texture filenames in your climates. The good news about the bad news, however, is that these breaking-changes will make it very easy to carry your climates forward in future upgrades, and also to share your climates with other users (if you so choose).

Okie dokie. The first step, after installing v2.4, is to create a new directory in the [L3DT v2.4 path]\Resources\Climates folder to hold your custom climates, and copy your climate files and textures into that directory. This is different to the old version, where textures and climates were kept separate, but this way is much more portable.

Once your climate files are in place, you'll need to open the climate manager in L3DT (utilities->climate manager). Here you need to load the climate files. L3DT will (or should) automatically translate these to the new XML-based format, so you don't need to change the filename or anything.

And now we get to the painful bit – re-setting all the texture filenames. In the climate manager, select your climate and hit 'edit' to open the climate editor. Then, select the first land type in the list and hit 'edit' again to open the land type editor. To set the texture, you need to go to the 3rd tab-pane (texture layers). If there is no texture layer in the list, create one, and set the texture filename to your desired texture. Ditto for the bump-map filename (if you use bump-mapping). The other settings in the texture-layer are used for high-res textures, but as I understand it you use the 1x res textures with an up-scaled heightfield instead, yes? In this case, you don't need to bother with the other settings - which is good, since I haven't written the user-guide on this part yet. This process must then be repeated for all the land types in all of your climates.

Now, the process I've written here might be slightly inaccurate or missing some steps, as I'm away from my own computer and I don't have L3DT installed here to actually test these steps. If you find any problems, please don't hesitate to ask.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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