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L3DT release 2.4 BETA

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L3DT release 2.4 BETA

Postby Aaron » Fri Apr 14, 2006 11:10 am

Hello everyone,

I've uploaded the first beta-release of L3DT v2.4. You can read all about it on news page.

Cheers,
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Postby JavaJones » Fri Apr 14, 2006 3:44 pm

Woohoo! Congrats on the first 2.4 release. I hope I get some time to play with it soon. :D

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Postby monks » Fri Apr 14, 2006 5:28 pm

yum yum- thanks Aaron!

:D

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Postby monks » Tue Apr 18, 2006 8:43 am

:lol: love the new walk through

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Postby Aaron » Fri Apr 21, 2006 3:53 am

Hi Monks,

I'm glad you liked it. It was sort of thrown-in as an afterthought, in quite a hasty manner, but I think it turned out okay. I plan to refine it a bit in future releases, and I’ll add multi-lingual support too (probably only UTF-8 languages; no Unicode yet). At the moment everyone gets my Australian English version (ooh, I wish it had the accent too!), but if anyone has some spare time to translate the pages into their native tongue and send me the text, I can add the results to the strings.ini.xml file and add a 'choose language' dialog box.

Cheers,
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Postby DeathTwister » Mon Apr 24, 2006 12:49 pm

Wow, That climate editors is awesome bro....../smiles & :lol: .

I installed the new update and started playing with the editor and it took me about 3 minutes to crash L3DT so bad I had to re-install it again. No I am pretty sure it was me, I got way carried away with my self and did a number to your software, so no bug other then me, ROTFL........ :wink:

OK so after I re-installed first thing I realized was that if I was going to use all of my textures I had had in the directory, I needed to make all the texture_BUMPs for them as well in order not to mess with the editor as that was one of the problems I had as it really likes the _bump to be in the dir. if you are using it, /chuckles. :P
But then I realized that in the new Beta form you have I could not import textures to make the new -bumps for them, so I had to go to the older version in order to make them and then come back into the Beta version to play with them again and see if I had it right this time and I did.

COOL, Cool it was and I started having my way with it then and was a happy artist. so I am pretty sure your import/export function is not working right on the new beta version bro.

Another thing I noticed is the "Pixel per land type" in the texture editor is working now also Woot. before for me it would error out badly(older versions), now it is working good it seems to me. At first I had it crash, but6 I must have done something wrong as it is working good now for me, Thanks.

I just now see you have a Tut on the climate editor and I will have to go check it out later as I need to know about some of those values and how you set them a bit. I played with the Bump and Hi-pass bump? thingy and got a bit more then I expected with the melding of the texture maps. I am taking notes as I can see where I will want some of these effects later, but not quite now. But wanted to share a few Pics of the new editors and what you can do with it with very little trouble at all after I figured it out some.

Image

Image

Image

As you can see when I messed with those values just a bit it and changed how the blending was much more strong the I expected? is that the right word I am looking for? humm, and all I did on the bump blend and hi pass was add a 1 to the values like 0.0500000 to 1.0500000 as an example. OOH ya and very cool how it is all so very 64 bit, very sweet........Anyway I personally am having a gas with this and will figure it all out in the next few days after I get back from a business run to the SF bay area I have to make tomorrow morning, then back by weeks end. I can see i have many hours spinning those values around in the near future haha..

Keep up the great work and it is always such a pleasure to play with L3DT my good Aussie friend hehehehe /chuckles ....This artist is one happy camper with L3DT for Terrains.........You the man.

I will check out your Tut when I get back Aaron and then maybe ask a question or 2 and maybe add to it a bit if I come up with something cool to add if that is OK?.....:wink: :oops: :lol: :idea: :idea: :idea: :idea: :idea:

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Postby monks » Tue Apr 25, 2006 9:59 am

Hey- some nice looking land textures in there. I've not got too deep into the per-pixel and bump maping: very nice :)

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Thanks

Postby monks » Tue Apr 25, 2006 10:03 am

Aaron- I'd just like to say a big thanks from everyone for supporting our requests/interests over at ME-DEM. The georeffing apparently works- :) good to know!
We know you're busy and that, so keep up the great work pal,

Cheers,
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Postby DeathTwister » Tue Apr 25, 2006 11:03 am

Here here, I agree with Monks. Thanks Aaron your great. KK back in a few days going to the San Fransisco Bay area for a couple of days on Bizzzz..... and I'll be back to mess with the new editor some more. Ta ta.

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Postby Aaron » Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:31 pm

Hello,

Wow, lots of stuff to reply to:

DeathTwister wrote: I installed the new update and started playing with the editor and it took me about 3 minutes to crash L3DT so bad I had to re-install it again. No I am pretty sure it was me, I got way carried away with my self and did a number to your software, so no bug other then me, ROTFL........ :wink:


Eeek! You weren't by any chance editing climates during a calculation? That might cause a crash. As for requiring a re-install, um, I don't know. Sounds nasty. Has anyone else noticed this?

DeathTwister wrote: OK so after I re-installed first thing I realized was that if I was going to use all of my textures I had had in the directory, I needed to make all the texture_BUMPs for them as well in order not to mess with the editor as that was one of the problems I had as it really likes the _bump to be in the dir. if you are using it, /chuckles. :P


Yeah, the editor works best if textures & bump-maps are in the same directory (it was easier that way). I don't find it too much of an imposition, but I can add a separate directory for bump-maps if you prefer.

DeathTwister wrote:But then I realized that in the new Beta form you have I could not import textures to make the new -bumps for them...so I am pretty sure your import/export function is not working right on the new beta version bro.


Really? I didn't think I had broken that. Hmmm...[tinker, tinker]...it works for me. Perhaps this is related to the '.' in the path-name problem I reported (see here). Can you import from a texture located in the root directory (C:\)?

DeathTwister wrote:Another thing I noticed is the "Pixel per land type" in the texture editor is working now also Woot. before for me it would error out badly(older versions), now it is working good it seems to me. At first I had it crash, but6 I must have done something wrong as it is working good now for me, Thanks.


It used to crash for multiple climates in the one map. The same bug exists, but now the error is caught nicely and the calculation exits in an orderly fashion. Fixing this is on the to-do list. There also used to be a problem when filenames &c weren't declared just-so in climates, but the new climate editor fixes that.

DeathTwister wrote:As you can see when I messed with those values just a bit it and changed how the blending was much more strong the I expected? is that the right word I am looking for? humm, and all I did on the bump blend and hi pass was add a 1 to the values like 0.0500000 to 1.0500000 as an example.


Ouch! The values for bump-blending must sum to less than 1, and preferably less than 0.3. Generally, these values should be tiny, like 0.05...0.2. Thanks for the reminder though – I should add this to the tutorial somewhere.

DeathTwister wrote:OOH ya and very cool how it is all so very 64 bit, very sweet.


Only minimally; I use a few doubles here and there, and some int64's for pixel indexing. Otherwise L3DT is 32-bit (4294967295 is a very large number, and good-enough for most purposes!).

DeathTwister wrote:I can see i have many hours spinning those values around in the near future haha..


I wish you the best of luck! I used to despise editing climates when there were more than around 8 land types, because it took hours or days to do the final tweaking (change-and-test-and-change-and-test). With the climate editor I now hit that limit at around 20 land types, which is quite an improvement. In particular I recommend you use the enable/disable button when developing a climate to disable land types other than the ones you're testing – it makes the calculation so much quicker.

DeathTwister wrote: I will check out your Tut when I get back Aaron and then maybe ask a question or 2 and maybe add to it a bit if I come up with something cool to add if that is OK?.....:wink: :oops: :lol: :idea: :idea: :idea: :idea: :idea:


Whoa, the emoticons are making my dizzy! Where was I? Oh yes, changes are welcome. If you want to write your own tute, that's cool too.

And, last but not least:

monks wrote:Aaron- I'd just like to say a big thanks from everyone for supporting our requests/interests over at ME-DEM. The georeffing apparently works- Smile good to know!
We know you're busy and that, so keep up the great work pal,


Why thank-you. For my part, I'd like to thank the ME-DEMers for their creativity and vigour; there have been some mighty-fine feature-requests, not to mention several bug-reports. Without user-input I probably never would have got much past L3DT 2.0 (or maybe 2.1), so thanks all!

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby DeathTwister » Mon May 01, 2006 1:32 pm

Hay Aaron, good morning,

Yawn, just got up a bit ago, had a very long bike ride yesterday and I am still sore all over. Some very nasty single track that beat the zrdfyi out of me 8) .

Eeek! You weren't by any chance editing climates during a calculation? That might cause a crash. As for requiring a re-install, um, I don't know. Sounds nasty. Has anyone else noticed this?


No, I just think I made some pretty stupid settings before I knew what I was doing. I do that sometimes /chuckles. That one was on me I think.

Yeah, the editor works best if textures & bump-maps are in the same directory (it was easier that way). I don't find it too much of an imposition, but I can add a separate directory for bump-maps if you prefer.


Wow that would be nice but I was getting around OK for me, just getting used to stuff, but making bumps inside the climate editor? would be nice instead of the old way we make them. :idea:

Really? I didn't think I had broken that. Hmmm...[tinker, tinker]...it works for me. Perhaps this is related to the '.' in the path-name problem I reported (see here). Can you import from a texture located in the root directory (C:\)?

I just noticed a bug with L3DT v2.4 beta1 that messes-up mosaic filenames when you have a '.' in the directory name. This will be fixed in beta2.


Humm maybe that is it, but I will try and make some later again and see if that works, maybe it was me. I'll get back on that later then.

It used to crash for multiple climates in the one map. The same bug exists, but now the error is caught nicely and the calculation exits in an orderly fashion. Fixing this is on the to-do list. There also used to be a problem when filenames &c weren't declared just-so in climates, but the new climate editor fixes that.


ah I see, then it wasn't me exactly ROTFL cool, KK I can live with that. Humm that also may be in part why I crashed originally and had to re-install. Also my new settings I did probably directly effected what you just said with what I did. Did that make sense?

Ouch! The values for bump-blending must sum to less than 1, and preferably less than 0.3. Generally, these values should be tiny, like 0.05...0.2. Thanks for the reminder though – I should add this to the tutorial somewhere.


ROTFL, yes I found that out and think that also helped crash when I did. But after I read the Tut you did I got it together, also I had values like 40.000000% on bumps, Doh most stupid hahahahaha, was using it like Max and didn't take long to figure out I was on the wrong track ROTFL....Should have read the Tut first ROTFL but I love kicking cans as they say.

Only minimally; I use a few doubles here and there, and some int64's for pixel indexing. Otherwise L3DT is 32-bit (4294967295 is a very large number, and good-enough for most purposes!).


Here here I agree....... :lol:

I wish you the best of luck! I used to despise editing climates when there were more than around 8 land types, because it took hours or days to do the final tweaking (change-and-test-and-change-and-test). With the climate editor I now hit that limit at around 20 land types, which is quite an improvement. In particular I recommend you use the enable/disable button when developing a climate to disable land types other than the ones you're testing – it makes the calculation so much quicker.


Hahahaha, naw that is what artists do bro, I TWEAK the sdfdgj out of stuff. Kind of my job I think is to spend the time tweaking stuff. I can make stuff pretty darn quick, but in the end it takes so many hours of tweaking to get things right that you get kinda used to it after a while. Faster computers is what I always need and use, hahahahahaha :roll: Scenes, Lighting, textures, mesh, shaping it is all a huge tweak in the end to make what I like to call world paintings that we visit.

Why thank-you. For my part, I'd like to thank the ME-DEMers for their creativity and vigour; there have been some mighty-fine feature-requests, not to mention several bug-reports. Without user-input I probably never would have got much past L3DT 2.0 (or maybe 2.1), so thanks all!


Yes, yes just wanted to agree with you about those guys at ME-DEM as they are a great bunch of peeps, and I am having fun myself with getting to know and share with them.

I have a question or 2 on the other climate Tutorial blog so I will not double my thoughts till you post on those Aaron, so until then I see ya a bit later. Thanks for getting back to this post bro.

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Postby Aaron » Tue May 02, 2006 8:39 am

Hi Maylock,

DeathTwister wrote:but making bumps inside the climate editor? would be nice instead of the old way we make them. :idea:


Hmmm...an interesting idea. The climate-editor interface was intentionally left very minimalist because at the time I didn't know what features people would expect or want. Suggestions such as these will be considered when I re-visit the interface in a the future release, when I've had enough feedback from enough users to know what is and is not required.

DeathTwister wrote:Humm that also may be in part why I crashed originally and had to re-install. Also my new settings I did probably directly effected what you just said with what I did. Did that make sense?


I think I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure bad settings alone can crash L3DT - they certainly should not, anyway.

Oooh...hang on a minute, I vaguely recall that L3DT can crash badly in some places if no climates are specified in the climates.ini.xml file. The only way to fix this problem is to either reinstall or else manually add a climate entry to that file. Hmmm...I'll look into it.

Edit: Yup, if there aren't any climates defined, or if the climate file can't be found, the app will crash in some dialogs. I probably should fix this up, or else prevent the app from starting when this condition is found. Either way, the best fix will be a re-install, unless you really know what you're doing with the settings files.

DeathTwister wrote:
aaron wrote:Ouch! The values for bump-blending must sum to less than 1, and preferably less than 0.3. Generally, these values should be tiny, like 0.05...0.2. Thanks for the reminder though – I should add this to the tutorial somewhere.


ROTFL, yes I found that out and think that also helped crash when I did.


Invalid values in the bump-mapping shouldn't crash the app, it will just make the output look wonky.

Cheers,
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Postby DeathTwister » Tue May 02, 2006 2:38 pm

Morning all,

In case you just woke up :wink:

Aaron wrote:
Hmmm...an interesting idea. The climate-editor interface was intentionally left very minimalist because at the time I didn't know what features people would expect or want. Suggestions such as these will be considered when I re-visit the interface in a the future release, when I've had enough feedback from enough users to know what is and is not required.


Glad you think it has some merret and will look at it. I kinda thought it might be a good idea but wasn't sure.

aaron wrote:
I think I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure bad settings alone can crash L3DT - they certainly should not, anyway.

Oooh...hang on a minute, I vaguely recall that L3DT can crash badly in some places if no climates are specified in the climates.ini.xml file. The only way to fix this problem is to either reinstall or else manually add a climate entry to that file. Hmmm...I'll look into it.

Edit: Yup, if there aren't any climates defined, or if the climate file can't be found, the app will crash in some dialogs. I probably should fix this up, or else prevent the app from starting when this condition is found. Either way, the best fix will be a re-install, unless you really know what you're doing with the settings files.


Yup I am pretty sure that is what happened.

Aaron wrote:
Invalid values in the bump-mapping shouldn't crash the app, it will just make the output look wonky.


Oh ya, when I had the values way the _____ up there, it was crazy :roll: ROTFL.

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