What's New in Daylon Leveller 2.2

New Features

• Marker tool added. This lets locations of interest be tagged and annotated. Markers can be navigated to with the new Navigate, Go to Marker... command.
   
• Gridline overlay added.
   
• Navigate Map command added. This brings up a dialog showing the entire heightfield; dragging on it pans the map pane to where the mouse is.
   
• Water tool added. This lets the water level be interactively defined.
   
• Tools menu added. External apps can be invoked and passed custom arguments, such as the current document, current tool map position, etc.
   
• Public binary heightfield clipboard format used when copying/pasting.
   
• Public text heightfield clipboard format available.
   
• Plug-in API now version 9; adds generic property access functions.
   
• If the file "default.lvw" exists in the Leveller directory, it will be used to assign view settings to newly created/opened documents.
   
• If the file "default.ter" exists in the Leveller directory, it will be used when new documents are created.
   
• Added world units labeling.
   

Improvements

• Middle button click-drag pans the map. Mousewheel on the map pane zooms in/out.
   
• Brush preview effect marker is easier to see.
   
• Alpha-channel (masked) textures supported.
   
• The elevation tooltip is visible when a selection has been made (instead of flashing as the mouse moves). This also makes it possible to easily see what the elevations are underneath a floating selection.
   
• Ctrl+Spacebar toggles between the current tool and the Pan tool.
   
• Alt and Numpad +/- zoom the map in and out, respectively (from the center of the map view if the mouse is not over the map).
   
• If Leveller is launched while it is already running, the existing instance is switched to instead.
   
• If the water level has a texture, it is now visible on the map.
   
• Detect (on app activate) when document has been externally modified. Prompt user and reload if directed to do so.
   
• Selection mask can be copied to the clipboard as a grayscale bitmap.
   
• Secondary Copy commands placed in submenu.
   
• Map overlay options moved from menus into Map Properties dialog box.
   
• OpenGL nearplane constant changed from 0.05 to 1.0. The previous value was very close to the camera, promoting Z-buffer trashing in solid views.
   
• Edit, Grid Size, Custom... dialog had resampling notes added.
   
• Filter, Scale... dialog supports interpolation style.
   
• Raytracer uses doubles instead of floats internally, appears to greatly improve rendering of large heightfields.
   
• If the time it takes for a filter to modify the heightfield is less than 1/4 second, the overview map is redrawn immediately. This makes it possible, on small heightfields (or fast machines) to see filter effects "live" while accelerator keys are held down (e.g., Smooth, Smooth More, Sharpen).
   
• Textures and alpha channels are bilinearly sampled in raytracer.
   
• Textures modified externally are detected and automatically reloaded on app activate.
   
• Light object can be shown/hidden independantly between scene and map panes.
   
• Added surface area readout to Properties window.
   
• Document file I/O uses exclusive share access to help fix read/writes to remote volumes.
   
• Heightfield's memory usage stats added in Properties dialog.
   
• Camera object can be hidden on map view.
   
• When a selection exists, its marquee no longer animates rapidly if the mouse is moving when used with other tools.
   
• Elevation tooltip drawn using a larger and antialiased font.
   
• The scene pane is drawn with the flight render style when a document window or the application's main window is resized, resulting in better performance for those using the "Show window contents while dragging" option in the Windows display control panel.
   
• The app's idle handler is no longer used to maintain map overlay elements, which may improve stability and performance.
   
• Saving a file writes it to a temp file in the same folder as the target file, then deletes the target and renames the temp to the target.
   
• More dialog boxes share a consistent placement of the OK and Cancel buttons.
   

Fixes

• Scrollbar thumb position computation done outside of the map's update handler. This may fix a long outstanding but extremely hard-to-reproduce bug where Leveller would suddenly quit for no apparent reason.
   
• Textures we're getting mapped horizontally slightly wrong, causing textures the same pixel size as the heightfield to show horz. distortion. Fixed.
   
• Bilinear resampling bugs fixed. Bilinear is currently the best choice when resizing smaller.
   
• Leveller documents can be directly opened from the Windows shell.
   
• Starting Leveller when it is already running activates the currently running instance instead of starting another one.
   
• File, Revert, didn't restore work area rect to original heightfield's size; fixed. The problem happens when resizing a heightfield smaller and then reverting; editing couldn't be performed on regions outside the rectangle of the smaller heightfield.
   
• Raytracer's surface normal perturber let perfectly vertical shader normals cause invalid operation; fixed.
   
• Water object assumed imagemap ref was valid when invoking Water Level dialog even if no imagemap was attached. Fixed.
   
• Span Filter correctly spans selected areas which happen to be flat, instead of setting them to zero.
   
• If the elevation tooltip was displayed, its ghost would obscure things when the mouse was dragging something on the map, e.g., a floating selection. This has been fixed.
   
• Map overlay attributes stored in view files.
   
• When a doc had multiple views, plug-ins calling GetMapDC() would get the DC of the view that was last updated, instead of the view that was active. One symptom was the Measure tool drawing its preview line on the wrong map pane. Fixed. ReleaseMapDC() was similarly adjusted. DCs should be released at the earliest possible time.
   
• Raytracer instanced bumpmapping shaders more than once for the same scene objects; fixed.
   
• Raytracer's bumpmapper passed to the shader the address of the shaderstruct's pExtra member instead of pExtra itself; Fixed.
   
• Raytracer's bumpmapper was referring to colorizer info when invoking bump shaders. Fixed.
   
• More dialogs support the F1 key to display help.
   
• HTML files (used for documentation) can be opened by passing the URL directly to the Windows' ShellExecute function or by opening a specified browser and passing the URL as an argument to it. This fixes the problem where anchored URLs (those containing trailing "#" references) didn't appear correctly in newer versions of Windows/IE.
   
• "jpg" filetype image_map option in exported POV scripts replaced with "jpeg" instead, making JPEG textures exportable.
   
• Opening bitmap file dialogs that only support BMP/TGA no longer offer ".jpg" as the filename when the default bitmap format is JPEG.
   
• Added registry update verifier when Leveller requests licence code. If update fails, a helpful dialog appears.
   

What's New in Daylon Leveller 2.0

New Features

• Plug-in API supports tool plug-ins, direct heightfield pixel access, easy surface normal determination, and easy inter-vertex height determination. Functions added are: GetHFdata, PanelLayout, GetMapDC, ReleaseMapDC, ShowStatusMessage, ForceHFLo, ForceHFHi, GetHFnormal, SetHFnormalCompStyle, SetHFnormalSmoothing, and GetPreciseHeight.
   
• Two sample plug-in tools included: Measure, which measures distances on the heightfield, and Noise Brush, which randomly digs/raises the heightfield as you drag the mouse over it.
   
• Informational tooltip added to map view, when moving mouse over map (but not when dragging mouse).
   
• Added 'File, Mail To...' command. Lets the current document be sent to e-mail recipients.
   
• Troubleshooting, Log Commands... command added. This helps analyze runtime problems by seeing what happened before the problem and at what point it occured.
   
• Added 'Selection, Rectify' command, which converts the current selection to its minimal bounding box.
   
• Added 'How do I...' section to documentation.
   

Improvements

• Documentation uses frames for easier topic browsing.
   
• Glossary doc page has its topics directly reachable from other links.
   
• 'Edit, Resize Grid' command supports scaling the elevation data to match the new HF dimensions, and choosing the resampling style.
   
• Pressing Enter in a settings panel edit field updates the value to the tool, instead of having to press Tab to move the focus away from the field. This is handy if you want the focus to remain in the field to try out different values.
   
• Mouse map position's elevation is reported nicer.
   
• Shape tools report mouse position.
   
• Some plug-in API levutil_ routines had their interfaces simplified.
   
• Filter, Span dialog makes it more obvious if the span is for the selection vs. the whole heightfield.
   
• Filter, Span command supports selected areas better.
   
• Filter, Smooth More (Shift+F3) command added. This uses a 5 x 5 kernel like the Heavy Smooth plug-in and fixes its averaging divisor bug. It also uses much less memory.
   
• Filter, Invert now has a dialog; lets one choose the inversion point.
   
• Doubled size of colormap CLUTs; made mapping of colors to elevations more precise.
   
• Made span readout in Span filter dialog more readable. Same for Clip filter dialog.
   
• Scale dialog offers world unit choices for vertical axis.
   
• Build number included as part of Leveller version info.
   
• Window Properties dialog shows more stats for current non-floating sel mask, such as pixels selected, span within mask, etc.
   
• Tip of the Day dialog antialiases its text better.
   
• 8-bit bitmap output supports arbitrary span output.
   
• Zoom tool supports arbitrary area selection.
   
• Selection tools don't display out-of-bound marquees when starting a mousedrag outside the heightfield.
   
• Zooming out can be animated. Zooming can be done in large steps.
   
• App prefs are saved when changed, not just when Leveller exits.
   
• If a plug-in couldn't be initialized because it requires a newer version of Leveller, the user is informed better.
   

Fixes

• JPEG I/O works properly.
   
• The Undo buffer's VM file is no longer misread, and it is also read much faster.
   
• The fullscreen mode properly redraws itself if the document has its "After flying...", "Draw the scene..." setting enabled.
   
• VRML export outputs water object correctly when world units are used.
   
• Superfluous file handle no longer used when importing bitmaps as elevation data.
   
• Off-by-one pixel problem in OpenGL texture mapper fixed.
   
• Single pixels on bottomost row of heightfield can be selected.
   
• One-bit Windows BMP bitmaps were not being read correctly as selection masks; fixed.