Hi Redrobes,
To view the tiles in 2D you can also use L3DT's interface, which may be neater than using file explorer. To show tile borders, select 'view->display effects->show tile borders'. In previous versions both the detail and speed of the display in L3DT was a bit wonky on large maps, but with the new mipmapped renderer added a few weeks back you get about the same render time across any map size and at any zoom.
I will set that config param and watch the effect.
You'll know it when you see it; there will be two (or more) blocks being processed in parallel in the display.
I say "or more" because you can in fact specify any number of cores, not just one or two. Thus those lucky souls with a 4-core machine can use them all. However, I would not recommended anyone specify more cores than you actually have; it shouldn't break anything, but it won't run terribly well. Anyway, once I'm satisfied it's all working properly, I'll make L3DT auto-detect the core count and enable multi-threading by default.
I'm yet to really clock the effect of the 2nd core, but a preliminary test got about a 1.5x speedup at best. This
might be because only one thread is allowed to load/allocate/clear tiles at any time (to prevent nasty cache problems,) and thus they do have to wait for one another every so often. More optimisations may be possible in some instances, but I expect that will have to wait for the new year.
There was a few notes in an event log window that popped up about not getting some pixels in a WMF file or something
Ah, I've seen this too once or twice. Either I have an I/O bug in my WMF reader and/or writer, or I've just got an overly-sensitive test running on the WMF loader that is triggered by unusual but acceptable pixel values. I'll look into this next year too.
Cheers,
Aaron.