Hello everyone,

For those that haven't visited the L3DT website lately or subscribed
to the automatic news-feeds, you may be interested to know that there
is a new release of L3DT available (v2.4). The main differences with
the previous version (v2.3d) are:

* Improved texture blending, including better high-res detail and
strata effects.
* Better heightfield generation (using a new thermal erosion routine).
* A user-interface for editing climates (still a bit crude, though).
* Some tweaks to the user-interface to make it more streamlined.
* A built-in walk-through guide for new users.
* Better file support, particularly for RAW and images.
* Rudimentary geo-referencing support for the VTP .bt terrain format.
* An improved installer that allows multiple versions to coexist nicely.
* Several messy text-based formats were upgraded to XML.
* There were loads of bug-fixes.

The commercial release of L3DT Professional, as we discussed on this
list late last year, is now available. Interested parties may purchase
a non-expiring license (via PayPal) from the downloads page at a cost
of $25 USD:

www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/downloads/professional.php

The free Standard Edition is also available, and hopefully sufficient
for a lot of people's needs. The current limitations of SE are:

* The maximum size for heightfields and textures is capped at 2048 x 2048.
* Mosaic heightfields are disabled (though mosaic textures are allowed).
* It doesn't do the ultra-high res textures (4x res is the limit).
* It doesn't do high-res light-mapping or bump-mapping.
* It does not include wizard presets (although I may enable this soon
in SE).

Otherwise, it's pretty much the same as Pro.

Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all the
members of the mailing list who registered for the beta program and
helped-out with bug reports and feature suggestions. I couldn't have
got to this point without y'all.

Best regards,
Aaron.