Changelog for Daylon Leveller

Fixes | New Features | Changes | Improvements | Removed Features

Fixes

(July 25/24) Some GUI elements (e.g. tools palette, properties panel) could still use old GUI scaling preference instead of actual display scale; fixed.
(July 14/24) A textured heightfield wouldn't show the texture when the document was opened but would on subsequent scene updates; fixed.
(July 8/24) The first-time app launch would use a display scaling of 100% instead of Windows display scale; this has been fixed.
(July 7/24) Preset heightfield resolution choice fields can also be fully navigated with the up arrow key instead of only with the down arrow key.
(July 5/24) A tool's cursor could be positioned up to a heightfield pixel away from the map's north and/or west edge and still show the elevation readout; fixed.
(July 5/24) A marker could be positioned up to a heightfield pixel away from the map's south and/or east mesh edge and still show elevation/slope readouts; fixed.
(July 4/24) Keyboard controls dialog didn't take display scaling into account; fixed.
(July 1/24) Moving a golf hole number was incorrectly described as "Select golf hole number" in the Edit, Regress To... dialog; fixed.
(July 1/24) Autoscroll wasn't happening when moving golf hole numbers; fixed.
(July 1/24) Autoscroll wasn't happening when moving a vector shape anchor's control point; fixed.
(June 30/24) Some users experienced the tool settings panel having a mis-centered vertical content layout; fixed.
(June 28/24) Golf hole routing node circles adapt to display scale, and are easier to drag (mouse needs to be within circle instead of close to its center).
(June 27/24) Texture and filler buttons in the Shape Appearance dialog take display scale into account.
(June 27/24) Texture Placer tool handles take display scale into account.
(June 27/24) Cross section map position indicator takes display scale into account.
(June 27/24) Marker icons and their captions take display scale into account.
(June 27/24) Gridline captions and map pane elevation readout take display scale into account.
(June 26/24) Markers and their captions drawn on the scene pane are no longer clipped by the heightfield, and their position is precise instead of being vertically offset.
(June 25/24) Preference setting checkbox to allow Dig/Raise tool behavior to be reversible with right mouse button restored after being accidentally removed.
(June 22/24) Color bar in Colormap dialog was not supporting HighDPI awareness; fixed.
(June 11/24) Custom checkbox widget was unnecessarily used in dialog boxes; fixed.
(June 10/24) Tip of the Day dialog text could have repeated doublequote characters; this has been fixed and they've also been replaced with nicer curved doublequote marks.
(June 10/24) Checkbox widget theme selected depending on version of Windows instead of assuming Windows 10.
(June 10/24) Dialog boxes for elevation mapping, raytracing, base shaping, and camera properties adjusted for HighDPI awareness.
(June 9/24) Ground Extents dialog and Datum/Projection dialog upgraded for HighDPI awareness.
(June 9/24) Updating the UI prefs through the Properties panel could corrupt the display scaling; fixed.
(June 7/24) Histogram viewer plug-in was not drawing gray rectangle when dragging to select multiple elevation count columns; fixed.
(June 7/24) Leveller GDAL driver had a bug causing it to crash when reading on 64-bit systems; fixed.
(June 3/24) Import options dialog for SVG shape import had wrong title; fixed.
(June 1/24) Global elevations toolbar and tool settings panel could look wrong if Leveller configured to be HighDPI aware; fixed.
(May 31/24) Reverting app preference changes in the Properties panel did nothing; fixed.
(May 31/24) Shapes, Join command would sometimes connect the wrong endpoints; fixed.
(May 22/24) Choosing the same space again for position or aim in the Camera dialog would mispopulate their related input fields; fixed.
(May 21/24) Main toolbar and plug-ins toolbar would change appearance (badly) after GUI scale was changed instead of waiting for app restart; fixed.
(May 18/24) Previewing a raytrace-to-disk operation was broken; fixed.
(May 16/24) The Stay Above Ground feature moved the camera to the wrong altitude; fixed.
(May 10/24) Map navigator's red focus rectangle would drift as dialog was resized; fixed.
(May 3/24) Changing the raytracer's settings was not invalidating the active document; fixed.
(May 2/24) Interacting with a formation tool (rect/oval/line)'s settings panel could crash; fixed.
(May 2/24) Raise tool was identifying itself as the Dig tool; fixed.
(April 30/24) Some raytracer threads could wait forever due to self- or near-intersection errors; fixed. The problem appears as unrendered tiles/scanlines and then Leveller waiting forever for them to fill in.
(April 29/24) Raytracer could crash when using e.g. deciduous and coniferous trees together; fixed.
(April 26/24) Tool settings panel handles input values better. Invalid values are replaced with previously set valid value.
(April 26/24) Global elevation toolbar handles input values better, e.g. can use a tool immediately without first pressing Tab. Enter key can also be used to confirm an input value.
(April 21/24) Leveller would crash if it lost focus to another application while starting an operation involving GPU-based brushes; fixed.
(April 21/24) Vector shape point epsilon drift during undo/redo of certain actions not taken into account; fixed. Points now considered identical even if differing by one 10,000th of a unit.
(April 20/24) Undo buffer issues (including maybe crashing) related to misreacting to coordsys changes fixed.
(April 18/24) Plug-in filters could report bogus time taken, causing "It will take (crazy long time) to undo the last operation." to be displayed; fixed.
(April 16/24) The heightfield-from-points command could crash if no elevated points were available in the vector scenegraph; fixed.
(April 16/24) Trying to use a non-power-of-two sized image for a custom brush could crash Leveller despite warning; fixed.
(April 13/24) Undoing edits involving transformed floating selections could crash if the Undo backing store preference was too low; fixed.
(April 10/24) External links in the Legal documentation page open in a new tab/window to open websites that don't allow being opened in frames.
(April 10/24) The "invalid parameter" message that would appear when accessing custom brushes without Image Library images has been replaced with a better message.
(April 5/24) Using the Prev/Next Brush Tool commands would wraparound at the 100px brush size instead of 200px; fixed.
(April 4/24) Transforming a floating selection (rotate, etc.) and then undoing it could crash; fixed.
(April 3/24) Tools palette originally shipped without tool tips; fixed.
(April 2/24) Contour lines button in main toolbar had no tool tip text; fixed.
(March 30/24) Extending a vector path and using "Edit, Clear" to delete its last anchor point and then clicking again with the Pen tool would crash; fixed.
(March 30/24) The Line tool would clip against the selection mask's bounding rectangle instead of the mask itself; fixed.
(March 27/24) Using the Select Next Tool or Select Previous Tool command would skip the custom brush tool; fixed.
(March 18/24) Clicking with the Pen tool, then doing a Select None and clicking again would create a line instead of two points; fixed.
(March 15/24) Custom brush tool was not deleting one or more textures from GPU memory when finishing; fixed.
(March 2/24) Custom brush transform range could be loaded incorrectly. E.g. specifying a rotation range of (45, 45) to force a diagonal appearance would result in a range of (0, 45) letting it randomly rotate. Fixed.
(February 23/24) "Tools, Toggle Zoom/Pan" command renamed to "Tools, Select Camera/Zoom/Pan Tool". Help text in status bar fixed also.
(February 22/24) "Filter, Smooth" command (F3) would smooth outside of non-rectangular selections; fixed.
(February 4/24) Raytracer was incorrectly deleting deciduous tree leaf shaders; fixed.
(February 3/24) Editing properties of multiple shapes would not blank the Note field in the Properties dialog if the shapes' notes differed; fixed.
(February 1/24) Selecting a single golf hole routing node displays its name in the status bar (if it has a name).
(January 31/24) File, Import dialog would proceed with import even if the specified datasource reference (file or folder) didn't exist; fixed.
(January 31/24) Tip of the Day dialog was mis-rendering some text; fixed.
(January 31/24) Some tips were missing in the Tip of the Day dialog; fixed.
(January 29/24) Some GDAL drivers e.g. TIGER would not provide an error message upon failure; fixed.
(January 29/24) The "Shapes, Import" command was broken; fixed.
(January 29/24) Shape Properties dialog could fail when validating unnecessary properties; fixed.
(January 28/24) Rubberstamp (Clone) brush tool could crash with some brush sizes (e.g. 50 px); fixed.
(January 28/24) Restore brush tool could crash with some brush sizes (e.g. 50 px); fixed.
(January 28/24) The "File, Export" command was broken; fixed.
(January 28/24) The "Navigate, Coordinate System, Geographic" command was broken; fixed.
(January 26/24) Fixed several broken links in the documentation.
(January 23/24) Default camera location/orientation may be incorrect making heightfield too distant; fixed. Workaround is to set the first viewpoint and save file. Opening should then move camera to that viewpoint.
(January 12/24) Reimporting a file after setting an elevation mapping could incorrectly change the mapping; fixed.
(January 9/24) Text files using a BOM header could cause last line of text to be truncated when read; fixed.
(January 4/24) Undoing a Resample command could misplace vector shapes; fixed.
(January 4/24) Undoing a Pad command could misplace vector shapes; fixed.
(January 4/24) Undoing a Crop command could misplace vector shapes; fixed.
(December 29/23) File handling preference "confirm reloads" wasn't implemented for texture files; fixed.
(December 27/23) Pressing F1 in the Advanced Filler Distribution Settings dialog would show a missing documentation page; fixed.
(December 27/23) Raytracer would leak memory when rock objects were included; fixed.
(December 20/23) Installer was not processing requested actions at end of installation (e.g. opening documentation); fixed.
(December 20/23) Installer displays message box reminding user to back up installer program and credentials.
(December 19/23) Raytracer would crash trying to render a non-rotated filler object; fixed.
(December 17/23) Camera indicator on map pane would not update without tracking when using mousewheel to zoom (dolly) scene pane with mousewheel; fixed.
(December 11/23) Perlin4 plug-in would not support all layers correctly; fixed.
(December 10/23) Documentation on Tools, Customize... command corrected.
(November 21/23) Documentation search dialog would get Unicode conversion error on search text longer than 16 characters; fixed.
(November 16/23) Rhino OpenNURBs export may have failed on 64-bit Windows; fixed.
(November 15/23) Changing document metadata with "File, File Info" command would not mark the document as dirty, causing no prompt to save when closing. Fixed.
(November 14/23) Status bar divider lines extended wider to look better on higher resolution displays.
(November 13/23) Import Vector Shape Data dialog would sometimes fail to open; fixed.
(November 11/23) Some bilinear sampling routines had incorrect edge filtering logic; fixed.
(November 11/23) Tile cache size and tile maximum resolution fields in raytracer's advanced settings dialog widened by one digit.
(November 9/23) Message dialogs were missing title text; fixed.
(November 9/23) Macro parser was ignoring enum values and assuming only the first option was specified; fixed.
(November 8/23) All text file reads look for BOM header instead of assuming ANSI encoding.
(November 8/23) App manifest sets high DPI awareness to none, letting Windows scale the UI if necessary instead of causing potentially bad UI layouts and tiny fonts.
(November 8/23) Internal directory search function handles wildcards better e.g. *.txt gets file.txt but not file.txt2, file.txt3, etc.
(October 29/23) Filter menu places alphabetized plug-in categories in proper order (instead of e.g. G-L at the bottom).
(October 29/23) Plug-in names are placed in true alphabetical order within their menus.
(October 29/23) Tools used in the scene pane determine better if they are over the heightfield.
(October 29/23) Raytracer renders flat heightfield areas better (i.e., without false negative gaps).
(October 13/23) Expanded Leveller's definition of "OpenGL unfriendly" to include bitmaps that are not 24-bit RGB nor 32-bit RGBA. Fixes issue with such bitmaps crashing Leveller when loaded as drape textures.
(October 12/23) Preference file saving transaction introduced bug causing "filesystem error" to repeatedly appear; fixed.
(October 7/23) Raytracer would use more threads than scanlines for small renders causing an internal error; fixed.
(October 7/23) Raytracer would finish while one or more threads still running; fixed.
(October 7/23) Raytracer would crash or stall when cancelled in mid-render; fixed.
(October 7/23) Raytracer using way too much stack space when many threads available; fixed.
(July 19/23) Import could fail due to EPSG datum CH1903+ not recognized; fixed.
(July 19/23) Import could fail due to measurement unit "metre" not being recognized as "m"; fixed.
(December 21/22) Document properties list would sometimes include "Stay above ground" item twice; fixed.
(November 26/22) Shape Properties dialog crashed when opening; fixed.
(May 28/20) Minimum brush size could go below one pixel when using tablet; fixed.
(May 28/20) Tablet stylus pressure could be significantly wrong under some conditions; fixed.
(May 28/20) A brush edit could sometimes already exist during a pointer-down event, causing a slow memory leak. Fixed.
(May 8/20) Resampling an extremely small or narrow heightfield/image could internally fail; fixed.
(October 12/19) Using multiple shapes filled with pine trees would crash the raytracer; fixed.
(October 11/19) Legacy Leveller documents that used an empty or unknown worldscale label wouldn't open properly; fixed.
(October 8/19) Undoing some partial heightfield edits could cause them to vertically shift; fixed.
(August 5/19) Shader-rendered main draping texture would not work with dot-product lighting modes; fixed.
(March 17/18) Importing flat heightfields would crash due to divide-by-zero error; fixed.
(March 3/17) USGS DEM import/export failed on non-North American locales; fixed.
(February 23/17) Selection, Select Elevations... dialog required lower elevation first; fixed.
(January 28/16) Sizes of raster selection edits misreported in the Edit, Regress To... dialog; fixed.
(November 28/15) An unselected document would export as all void pixels; fixed.
(November 27/15) Some CRS names appeared truncated in the Coordinate Reference Systems dialog; fixed.
(October 25/15) Perlin4 plug-in would misinterpret some types of zero-filled number fields; fixed.
(October 25/15) Perlin4 plug-in would add unnecessary fractional zeros to number fields in dialogs when non-North American locale current; fixed.
(October 18/15) Contour Lines dialog was forcing North American locale on default values; fixed.
(October 17/15) "Processing..." message on status bar would not switch to "Ready" after an edit was performed; fixed.
(October 17/15) GDAL-based exports would not support void elevations if selection mask was same size as document; fixed.
(September 19/15) Documentation for topic "Managing Leveller" had out-of-date information; fixed.
(September 19/15) Several documentation files had wrong font; fixed.
(June 17/15) Fixed problem where "invalid keyword argument" error would appear when opening a document on a non-English locale.
(May 6/15) Adobe Illustrator import (and possibly others) showed "unexpected EOF" message; fixed.
(April 19/15) Brush selection tool edits now work properly on large heightfields, and memory usage of these edits is also reported correctly.
(April 19/15) Undoing edits made by the Brush selection tool in "replace" mode would cause the selection mask to become clipped; fixed.
(April 18/15) "Selection, Feather..." command was horizontally clipping its results on multithreaded systems; fixed.
(April 18/15) Moving a floating selection would create an edit with an overly long timestamp; fixed.
(April 3/15) Possible infinite loop entered when finishing changes to a library when locale was North American; fixed.
(March 28/15) Fixed memory leak that occurred when a trim operation was performed with the Trim widget not over the heightfield.
(February 27/15) Region locales that had Unicode characters in their names caused installer and Leveller to crash; fixed.
(February 11/15) Shapefile import subdialog widended a bit, fixes clipping of long extent readouts.
(February 5/15) Temporarily force North American locale when reading metadata of files imported via GDAL; may fix import failures of certain files when locale is not North American.
(January 19/15) Animation, raytracing, and scene output dialogs had broken F1 help URL links; fixed.
(January 19/15) Empty dialog box fields could cause Unicode-compliant version of Leveller to misbehave; fixed.
(January 19/15) Imported shapefile datafields could get assigned to wrong shape elements; fixed.
(January 19/15) Shapefile import would crash if shapefile format had no data fields but a field mapping was used; fixed.
(January 19/15) Customizing, Libraries documentation topic accidentally made unavailable in TOC; fixed.
(January 19/15) Pressing F1 in the Libraries, Fillers, Primitive Settings dialog would bring up the wrong documentation page; fixed.
(January 19/15) Paste Text Elevations dialog would not remember target elevation setting; fixed.
(January 19/15) Point array settings were reset during POV-Ray output; fixed.
(January 19/15) Some image formats had inaccessible options when outputting; fixed.
(January 19/15) Using a non-planar base shape UV map could cause incorrect slab renderering; fixed.
(January 19/15) Renderman output would crash if water was included but not textured; fixed.
(January 19/15) App could crash when mouse pointer used on scene pane depending on current tool; fixed.
(January 19/15) Selection, Feather... dialog was not remembering gamma value; fixed.
(January 19/15) Filter, Replace command would misbehave if target range had zero span; fixed.
(January 6/15) Gridline significant digit places were written using size_t but read using int, fixed.
(December 12/14) View, Analyze... command offered reference heightfield option even when document had no reference heightfield, causing crash if chosen; fixed.
(September 23/14) Shapes, Modify, Smooth Polylines would fail on closed shapes having fewer than three anchor points; fixed.
(August 30/14) Histogram viewer plug-in would fail and/or crash if heightfield contained negative elevations; fixed.
(August 29/14) Website links collapsed into a single link to the main Daylon site since the links were broken.
(August 29/14) Performing an Undo while markers existed would sometimes destabilize Leveller; fixed.
(August 7/14) Object handle type used for plug-in API corrected for 64-bit internal pointer conversions; do not use 64-bit plug-ins built with SDK older than item date.
(August 3/14) Map pane autopanning was accidentally made inert; fixed.
(July 3/14) Importing multiband elevation data (e.g. 3-band 16-bit GeoTIFFs) was too clipped; fixed.
(November 15/13) Outputted animation bitmap frames work for non-raytraced view styles.
(November 15/13) Installer prompts for administrator privileges.
(August 21/11) STL output plug-in attaches base to rest of solid model better (all vertices connected).
(June 27/11) DirectDraw Surface output plug-in fixed, was using a 4-byte pitch alignment instead of zero.
(June 20/11) Raytracer displayed random single-pixel artifacts that increased with number of threads; fixed.
(June 17/11) Using the File, Close command on a document while one of its windows has an active dynamic LOD renderer no longer crashes.
(June 16/11) Camera tool pitching of scene pane may have worked incorrectly; fixed.
(June 5/11) Heightfield drape texture would not pick up lighting over 100%; fixed.
(June 5/11) OpenGL texture objects better handled when multiple windows are open.
(June 4/11) Mipmap building for images with alpha had increasingly opaque alpha in smaller mipmaps; fixed.
(June 2/11) Dynamic LOD renderer was not stopped if Alt+F4 or app window's close box was used to exit app; fixed.
(May 26/11) Selection mask loading, plain upsampling was half-shifting source pixels causing edge artifacts; fixed.
(May 25/11) Dynamic LOD renderer would sometimes take very long time to stop if in the middle of texture generating; fixed.
(May 24/11) Dynamic LOD renderer megatexture prebuilder was generating shaded textures; fixed.
(May 16/11) Image output format options dialog would force grayscale on color depths for some formats; fixed.
(May 16/11) Loading a selection mask from file occurred even if one cancelled the selection integration dialog; fixed.
(May 15/11) Changing the lightsource did not mark document as needing to be saved; fixed.
(May 11/11) imagemap_drape shader wasn't properly detected as unpreviewable; fixed.
(May 10/11) Layer list in field mapping dialog was sorted, mixing up which layer actually got edited when Edit was clicked; fixed.
(May 8/11) View frustum was not using auto-determined far clipping plane; fixed.
(May 8/11) Navigate, Elevation Mapping... command disabled if heightfield has raster coordsys but elevations do not (use the Span filter instead).
(May 6/11) Heightfield import overviews would fail to build if file's coordsys was raster; fixed.
(May 6/11) Elevation remapping would raise an error if elevation coordinate system existed but ground coordsys was "Raster". Now the remapping is skipped.
(May 5/11) Shapes, Output Shapes to Bitmap... command produced wrong images, fixed.
(May 3/11) Captions would not overlay (or overlay poorly) on every frame of an animation's bitmap frame output; fixed.
(May 3/11) Animation bitmap frame output using normal or navigation view mode would duplicate first frame to all frames; fixed.
(April 12/11) Program could crash if a bitmap was internally resized redundantly but had no data; fixed.
(April 10/11) The contour lines option was cut off by the dialog box's right edge in the Scene Appearance dialog; fixed.
(April 6/11) Raytrace to disk dialog crashed when previewing renders containing filler objects; fixed.
(March 16/11) Adobe Illustrator files containing 'Xb' and other 'X' operators could not import; fixed.
(January 27/11) Memory leak when copying image files fixed. This happened, e.g., when outputting an attached heightfield texture to a Renderman scene when the texture required format translation.
(August 2/10) Raytracer could think a ray had intersected the heightfield's overall bounds when it had not; fixed.
(July 25/10) Heightfield surface normals are not flipped if facing away from the camera, fixing dark artifacts during raytracing.
(July 23/10) Adobe Illustrator files couldn't be imported as shapes unless coordinate system was used; fixed.
(July 23/10) Opening a document when another document was already open would cause view settings to not be read; fixed.
(July 12/10) Raytracing to disk was failing to convert saved data on disk to final format; fixed.
(July 12/10) Animated raytracer frames had slightly wider FOV than still frames; fixed.
(June 21/10) Internal bitmap copies of similar type could cause unfilled scanlines at bottom of bitmap, or destablize the app; fixed.
(June 7/10) Pasting positionally would cause memory block to be released twice when app exited; fixed.
(June 6/10) Deleting segments from a vector path shape would fail; fixed.
(June 6/10) Lightsource information is persisted inside document files. When saving a document, the lightsource of the topmost view window is used.
(May 12/10) Camera position overlay on map pane wasn't updating after certain navigation commands issued unless tracking was on, fixed.
(April 17/10) High-resolution map render mode includes water level.
(March 25/10) Lightsource centered directly above heightfield could cause shadow tracing in raytracer to hang or crash; fixed.
(March 12/10) daylon::string::erase() off by one char, may have caused lat/lon measurement strings prefixed with compass indicators to be misevaluated; fixed.
(March 6/10) Animation frame bitmap output dialog warns about unspecified output filespec, and also that the output folder exists and can be written to.
(February 24/10) Vector shape import parameters remembered between imports.
(February 22/10) General-purpose DXF shape importer supports polyline vertex arc bulge attribute for smoother shapes.
(February 22/10) Shape import could fail if dataset contained only one shape; fixed.
(February 1/10) Texture auto-select tool evaluates color differences better and includes opacity weighting for textures that have alpha channel.
(January 11/10) DXF polyline format in the shape importer returned zero-area bounds; fixed.
(January 11/10) Shape bitmap output was omitting shapes incorrectly; fixed.
(January 5/10) Daylon image format was not handling alpha channel properly; fixed.
(December 14/09) Latitude gridline captions for lat/lon coordsys were grossly wrong at some map zoom levels; fixed.
(November 25/09) Filesystem pathspecs interpreted their validity incorrectly; fixed.
(November 6/09) ArcInfo ASCII files couldn't import if they used Macintosh-style text line endings; fixed.
(October 21/09) Edits that changed heightfield resolution could freeze program; fixed.
(October 14/09) Long processes avoid "Program not responding" situation in Windows Vista.
(October 8/09) DXF contour import handles elevated POLYLINE entities with only 2D points without raising an EOF exception.
(October 8/09) DXF shape export drops LWPOLYLINE option, adds layer name option.
(September 18/09) Raytracing immediately after navigating could cause billboards not to face camera; fixed.
(July 15/09) Raytraced nondirectional waves use the size parameter.
(July 15/09) Raytraced directional waves use of size parameter broken; fixed.
(July 8/09) "Plugin_Run failed" message would appear when a plugin-based edit was retired from a full Undo buffer; fixed.
(June 19/09) Pressing the middle mouse button down during a scene refresh will interrupt it instead of waiting for the refresh to complete, making it easier to interactively pan.
(June 18/09) Extending a vector path would fail and destablize app if an old edit was being retired at the same time; fixed.
(June 17/09) Clicking on the control point of an anchor of a vector path being created would cause nothing to happen instead of the path being extended; fixed.
(June 13/09) Vector shapes scenegraph texture attributes table compacted after any operation that deletes shapes. While not critical, the table would otherwise grow unnecessarily in size.
(June 13/09) Pasting vector shapes could cause a crash sometimes; fixed.
(June 11/09) Message dialogs set the application window as their parent.
(June 3/09) Reference shapes included in POV-Ray export scene description file size estimation.
(June 3/09) Animated POV-Ray camera postions not taking document-to-scene mapping into account; fixed.
(June 1/09) Animation export dialog displaying "invalid file" messages too much; fixed.
(May 30/09) Deleting a floating selection was creating an unnecessary edit backing store that could destablize the edit journal; fixed.
(May 15/09) Using the Camera tool on the scene pane would unnecessarily refresh the map pane from scratch, taking a long time if a slow overlay such as shadows was enabled; fixed.
(May 15/09) Loaded documents prune away any empty vector shapes accidentally saved in an earlier version. Saving prunes the vector shapes before writing to disk.
(May 15/09) Cursor would not change over scene pane when a different tool was selected, until the pointer was moved; fixed.
(May 1/09) Cancelled imports would leave "Gathering dataset information..." message on status bar; fixed.
(April 27/09) Map navigation dialog does not show markers unless they are visible in the map pane.
(April 27/09) Map navigation dialog shows vector shapes.
(April 20/09) Dialog box fields used for measurements detect invalid measures better.
(April 20/09) File monitor treated unfindable files as changed, which then corrupted the shared bitmap system; fixed.
(April 20/09) Lone box reference shapes would not have any attached textures appear; fixed.
(April 10/09) 8-bit PNG images with a hard alpha channel used as textures were coming in with the transparent areas reversed; fixed.
(April 2/09) Numerically transforming shapes would use the selected shape's center as the transform origin instead of the clicked point; fixed.
(March 5/09) Using the Pen tool with multiple open documents would cause path creating and extending to behave wrong and destabilize the program. This has been fixed.
(March 5/09) Plug-ins would freeze the program when trying to access their documentation from their own dialog boxes. This has been fixed.
(March 5/09) Vector shapes could not be pasted into a document unless it had at least one shape already; fixed.
(March 5/09) Error dialogs, plug-in message dialogs, and possibly other message dialog boxes were modeless, allowing the program to be operated without closing the dialog, eventually leading to a crash. This has been fixed.
(February 10/09) In the Ground Extents dialog, a south or east edge of zero could not be set; a "please specify a non-zero extent distance" message would appear. This has been fixed.
(February 10/09) Setting a south or east edge would place the north or west edge at the wrong location; fixed.
(February 10/09) A missing custom presets file could cause dialog boxes using them to crash; fixed.

New Features

(July 6/24) Added preference setting to let the legacy Blur tool be used.
(May 26/24) Properties panel added, lets many document properties and app preferences be set in a non-modal, display scalable and dockable panel.
(May 3/24) Raytracer viewport tiling options added.
(May 2/24) A tool's settings can be saved as an application default by right-clicking on the tool's settings panel and choosing "Set as Default".
(March 18/24) The "Shapes, Stroke Paths with Brush..." command lets vector shape paths be stroked with a custom brush.
(March 4/24) Vector shapes can be imported using SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. Works with native Inkscape SVG format too. Gray fill colors can be interpreted as elevations.
(March 1/24) Custom brushes added (experimental). Use the "Tools, Custom Brushes" command to create brushes.
(January 24/24) Added golf hole routing feature (used to be exclusive to Landshaper Golf).
(January 23/24) Added Restore brush tool, letting reference heightfield elevations be brushed into actual heightfield, like an interactive Undo.
(January 8/24) "File, Reimport..." command added, to help streamline reimporting a previously imported file. All dialogs are skipped.
(December 28/23) Added "Always visible" toggle for brush reticle option in map pane view settings, causes reticle to remain visible while editing.
(December 27/23) Glossary definition for the term "jitter" added to documentation.
(November 15/23) Progress bar background and foreground colors can be customized in General Preferences, Status Bar.
(November 10/23) "Invert" selection mode added; use Shift+Ctrl while using selection tool to locally invert (XOR) the current selection.
(October 24/19) Macros can be coded in Lua, allowing for variables, loops, etc.
(October 11/19) Filter and selector plug-ins can be created using Lua, a scripting language.
(September 17/19) Plug-in filters can have their placement in the Filter menu customized.
(August 26/19) Added Erode (Beyer) plug-in.
(May 26/18) ASCII Gridded XYZ import/export (GDAL driver) added.
(February 13/17) Terragen tilesets can be imported and exported.
(November 28/15) GeoTIFF export available (32-bit only).
(August 30/15) STL output plug-in supports "riddled solid" mode where solid floor is generated for selected heightfield cells only.
(March 25/15) Trim widget added.
(February 11/15) Shapes, Modify, Span... command added.
(December 29/14) Holding down the Ctrl key while using the Flatten or the Ramp tool will temporarily select the Sample tool.
(December 29/14) The secondary status bar can show the elevation under the pointer in an alternate unit of measure.
(October 30/14) Shape import field mapping layer can be named '*' to indicate that its mappings apply to all imported layers.
(October 30/14) Shape import field mappings can target shape elevation.
(January 9/14) Wavefront OBJ file inputter added to OBJ plug-in (use "File, Input, Wavefront OBJ..." to access).
(June 29/11) "GL perspective" camera lens added to raytracer, allowing for perfect scene matching at high FOV angles.
(May 19/11) Dynamic LOD renderer added.
(April 6/11) imagemap_drape shader lets raytracer include high-resolution TGA images on terrain.
(January 26/11) POV-Ray scene output includes filler object distributions.
(December 3/10) Elevation labels added.
(December 3/10) Contour lines added.
(December 3/10) Reference heightfield feature added to support cuts and fills analysis and other comparitive elevation reports.
(December 3/10) Restoration feature added which uses reference heightfield to undo edits.
(December 3/10) View, Analyze... command lets you do volume analysis.
(December 3/10) Cross section reporting added.
(December 3/10) True 3D scene objects can be placed, either as shape fills or as individual objects inside filled markers.
(December 3/10) Shape texturing added, letting vector shape fills and strokes use shader and image mapping effects instead of just flat colors.
(December 3/10) Contour lines (using path shapes) can be created from the heightfield.
(November 27/10) STL plug-in includes STL dataformat for importing Stereolithography meshes.
(August 30/10) Stereo rendering mode (using anaglyph) available, along with raytraced still image stereo pairs and anaglyph.
(May 19/10) "Shapes, Modify, Smooth Polylines..." command added, letting one add curvature to the anchor points of selected vector paths.
(May 19/10) "Shapes, Modify, Unsmooth..." command added, letting one add reduce or remove curvature from the anchor points of selected vector paths.
(May 3/10) Documentation can be searched with the "Help, Search..." command.
(January 5/10) Vectors shapes can be output (rasterized) to a bitmap image file.
(November 26/09) Vector path shapes can be tesselated and subdivided, and polylines can be simplified.
(October 29/09) Vector shapes can be filled and stroked with color, including variable opacity. Strokes can have definable width.
(October 5/09) Preference added to let the Camera tool pitch and yaw simultaneously (orbit) when used on the scene pane.
(September 19/09) Tool added to raytrace subareas of scene pane. Using the right mouse button reverses the current antialiasing setting.
(June 14/09) Autosave preference added, lets you automatically save a document after a specified number of edits.
(June 13/09) Select, Select Matching Shapes... command added. This makes it easy to select shapes similar to the currently selected shape(s).
(June 11/09) Select, Select Shapes... command added. This makes it easier to select vector shapes by name, note, length, elevation, etc.
(May 20/09) The View, Animation, Flightpath from Shapes... command lets you make an animation (flyover) camera path based on named vector shapes.
(April 27/09) Synchronizing the map pane with the scene (and vice versa) can be done using new commands in the Navigate menu.

Changes

(July 26/24) Powerline tool moved from plug-in toolbar to Tools palette.
(July 25/24) Measure tool moved from plug-in toolbar to Tools palette.
(July 16/24) Vector drape texture visibility defaults to off to boost render time in most situations.
(July 8/24) The default scene pane appearance has its auto-LOD option set to true for the navigation and editing render styles, to avoid sluggish rendering of newly created documents and requiring a manual style change.
(May 26/24) Tooltips support time delay and default to a delay of 0.33 seconds.
(April 13/24) Global elevations toolbar now enables only when one or more documents are open.
(April 3/24) Toolbar documentation updated to reflect Tools palette superceding legacy toolbars.
(November 11/23) Maximum raytracer tile cache size increased to 1024 MB (although 256 MB should be fine even at 1024 px tile resolution).
(June 24/10) Markers are now point shapes in the vector layer, which simplifies the user interface and lets markers be manipulated more flexibly.
(June 24/10) "Shapes, Properties..." command is now "Shapes, Basics..." and "Shapes, Geometry" is now "Shapes, Properties..."
(April 3/10) Old megatexture outputs are auto-deleted when megatexture generated, to save disk space.
(April 20/09) "View, Colormap..." and "View, Texture..." commands moved to the Edit menu, along with the "View, Reference Shapes" submenu. "View, Water Texture..." is now "Edit, Water Level, Texture...".
(February 10/09) OpenGL vertex array usage is disabled by default, to keep errors from appearing on less compatible systems when starting to use Leveller.

Improvements

(July 23/24) Raytracer megatexture building is now multithreaded, finishes significantly faster.
(July 18/24) Renderer fragment shaders assume texture parameters handle tiling.
(July 18/24) Renderer computes texture coords for texture drape on GPU.
(July 16/24) Colormaps, textures, and contour lines render on the scene pane in full quality whenever possible, using GPU shaders.
(July 16/24) Contour lines render on top of textures instead of underneath them.
(July 16/24) Renderer skips processing vector drape texture colors if the vector drape texture is empty.
(July 14/24) Texture properties dialogs include the word "Texture" in their title to make it more obvious that an object's texture is being edited.
(July 13/24) Non-power-of-two (and non-square) heightfield drape texture sizes supported by the faster and higher quality texture renderer. Images still need to be 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA however.
(July 9/24) Window, Resize Scene command replaces its submenu; preset window sizes now available inside the Set Scene Pane Dimensions dialog.
(July 7/24) Edit, Resample command replaces its submenu; preset heightfield resolutions now available inside the Resample dialog.
(July 6/24) Tools, Customize command renamed to Tools, External Tools, to increase clarity.
(July 5/24) Navigate to Marker dialog includes icon.
(June 28/24) Marker IDs appear more centered inside the marker icon regardless of display scale.
(June 18/24) Tooltips for tool palette buttons clarified more.
(June 16/24) "Allowed units" subsection added to Properties panel to let permitted measurement units for the current document be edited.
(June 15/24) "Allowed units for new documents" subsection added to Measures section in Properties panel.
(June 13/24) Built-in filters such as Rotate, Span, Terrace, Gaussian Blur, etc. support previewing.
(June 11/24) Tabbed dialogs tab headings spaced wider apart for easier readability.
(May 31/24) Properties panel uses checkboxes instead of comboboxes for boolean (yes/no) items.
(May 31/24) Scene settings, map settings, raytracing and LOD render dialogs support GUI scaling preference.
(May 10/24) Resizing the map navigator dialog is less sluggish.
(May 5/24) When possible, raytracer reduces viewport tile size to maximize number of threads available for viewport. This causes small viewports to render faster.
(April 30/24) Brush size in tool settings panel (for brush tools) matches input validation protocol used by other panel fields, i.e. reverting to previous setting if input invalid.
(April 29/24) Raytracer renders in an outward spiraling tile pattern to run faster by improving CPU cache coherency.
(April 19/24) If a tool has a keyboard shortcut, its tooltip will include it.
(April 12/24) Status bars support GUI scaling preference.
(April 11/24) Global elevations toolbar, tool settings panel, and tool tips use Tahoma instead of Segoe UI at 100%.
(April 11/24) Tool settings panel supports GUI scaling.
(April 11/24) Global elevations toolbar supports GUI scaling.
(April 10/24) Plug-in toolbar icons use better resampling method when shown at GUI scales above 100%.
(April 10/24) Tooltip vertical margins decreased a little to avoid overly large appearance.
(April 9/24) Main toolbar supports arbitrary GUI scaling, and includes hand-drawn 200% size to downsample from.
(April 3/24) View pane toolbars show tooltips.
(April 3/24) Plug-in toolbar supports GUI scaling and tooltips.
(April 3/24) Tool tip background changed to a lighter shade of yellow.
(April 3/24) Tool tip font changed from Tahoma to Segoe UI.
(April 3/24) Tools palette tool tips can be turned off in Advanced Preferences.
(April 3/24) Tools palette tool tip size supports GUI scaling.
(April 2/24) Some main toolbar buttons had their tooltip text include hotkey description.
(April 1/24) View pane toolbars support 150% GUI scaling (not just 100 and 200%).
(March 28/24) Each tool palette text caption draws in gray if the buttons in its group are all disabled.
(March 28/24) Spacing between tool palette button groups tweaked a bit to take into account all combinations of caption and divider visibility.
(March 28/24) Editing, brushes, and vector toolbars replaced by tool palette which supports the GUI scaling preference.
(March 28/24) Four extra preset brush sizes added to toolbar: 125, 150, 175, and 200 px.
(March 23/24) Custom brush tool settings can be overridden to "tweak" a brush without having to make a new brush.
(March 21/24) Blur tool supports opacity setting, allowing for easier ultralight blurring.
(March 11/24) Blur tool supports strength setting.
(March 3/24) Coordinate Reference Systems dialog can search with or without matching case of search text.
(February 7/24) Icon added to golf hole routing dialog.
(January 31/24) Some UI-related pics in the Tip of the Day dialog updated to use Windows 10 style.
(January 28/24) Several dozen screen shots of dialog boxes for the documentation upgraded to use Windows 10 style.
(January 27/24) Clipboard no longer locked while Paste Text Elevations dialog is open. Other apps can use clipboard and Leveller will gracefully fail later if necessary after dialog closes.
(November 24/23) Activity log no longer redundantly writes log header to file each time file is opened.
(November 14/23) Progress bar graphic updated to better match Windows 10.
(November 11/23) Bilinear upsampling of textures speed improved.
(November 9/23) Run macro dialog offers "all macro files" option.
(November 8/23) Example Filter plug-in menu configuration provided in the "samples" folder.
(October 30/23) TGA (Targa) bitmap file output much faster.
(July 27/23) Preference file saving made transactional to help avoid preference file corruption errors.
(October 18/19) Viewing a documentation page from the Help, Search... dialog (and by pressing F1 inside any dialog) now includes the navigation tree opened up to the requested page.
(October 15/19) Documentation search index made 50% smaller, loads faster.
(October 13/19) Documentation TOC entries that referred to lower levels now have their own subtopic listing pages.
(September 20/19) Right mouse button with camera tool disabled on scene pane, since it only changed the scene view in confusing ways.
(November 22/15) ArcInfo ASCII export offers a GDAL-based driver, writes elevations better.
(November 22/15) More geographic projections supported, coordinate reference systems from the GDAL database can be specified, and the document's WKT can be accessed.
(October 18/15) "Advanced Preferences, UI, Invert mousewheel" lets the viewing zoom feature work backwards.
(July 25/15) Two-channel PNG files now import as grayscale.
(April 25/15) On startup, the application window occupies the same place and size it had when the program last exited.
(April 19/15) Brush selection tool edits now use Undo memory better when brushing in corners of document.
(March 28/15) Trim widget works faster when using large elliptical trims.
(January 24/15) Locale support added, lets numbers be read and input using alternate characters for decimal point.
(August 30/14) Leveller GDAL driver supports reading TER files up to current version (10).
(August 29/14) Unicode characters supported for filenames, file refs, library object names, shape names, Text tool, etc.
(July 20/14) Histogram viewer plug-in improved.
(November 15/13) Registry entries no longer used except for MRU files submenu.
(August 6/11) STL output plug-in output files take 50% less disk space when using solid option.
(June 4/11) Dynamic LOD renderer loads textures more smoothly.
(June 4/11) Dynamic LOD renderer explains megatexture conflicts with settings better.
(June 4/11) Dynamic LOD texture cache size and thread settings moved to advanced subdialog.
(May 26/11) Selection mask loading supports bicubic upsampling; downsampling bilinear or bicubic uses area averaging.
(May 26/11) Shaders preload shared imagemap content to avoid reloads during rendering and megatexture prebuilding.
(May 26/11) Selection mask saving includes heightfield coordinate system.
(May 25/11) Automatic clipping plane determination improved, Z-fighting greatly reduced on large heightfields with water, near plane falls back to manual value if camera altitude within heightfield span.
(May 23/11) Dynamic LOD renderer megatexture prebuilder, if selection present, builds tiles inside the selected areas only.
(May 22/11) Dynamic LOD renderer checks that its settings are compatible with current megatexture (if megatexture has content).
(May 22/11) Dynamic LOD renderer supports all lighting modes (quick lighting is approximated with directional OpenGL lighting).
(May 22/11) Animation frame output supports anaglyph mode.
(May 22/11) 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080 HD video sizes added to Window Resize command.
(May 19/11) Maximum raytracer megatexture tile size increased from 512 to 1024 pixels, to improve appearance of large-format output.
(May 16/11) Selection mask loading from file supports gray palette sorting, loading from alpha channel, cornering of small files and resizing of large files.
(May 10/11) Progress bar graphic updated to better match Windows 7.
(April 15/11) imagemap_draper shader can support texture files larger than four gigabytes.
(April 15/11) Shader access pattern changed from scanline to tile, improves performance with some shaders.
(March 4/11) Selection of void (nodata) pixels after elevation data import can be controlled in preferences.
(March 4/11) Rectangular select and elliptical select tools support map pane autopanning.
(January 26/11) POV-Ray and Renderman scene output settings persisted in Leveller documents.
(December 3/10) Vector shapes can have their appearance feathered, to transition smoother against the heightfield and/or other shapes.
(November 16/10) STL output plug-in offers horizontal flipping options.
(November 8/10) ESRI contour shapefile import detects elevation data field better.
(August 13/10) Installer spreads options across several dialog pages, easier to use.
(August 13/10) Outputted animation bitmap frames can have their filenames start with any arbitrary number, to make subclip output easier.
(August 12/10) Documentation for scene rendering, animation, and scene description output moved to top-level "Rendering" topic.
(August 2/10) Raytracer megatexture is now persistent and auto-generating, with more tile creation options.
(August 1/10) Keyboard navigation speed can be varied by altitude. The closer the camera nears the heightfield, the slower it moves.
(July 29/10) Raytracer megatexture lets entire heightfield occupy a single tile if it fits.
(July 15/10) Marker icons appear closer to the ground in the scene pane.
(July 13/10) Raytracer speeded up slightly.
(June 10/10) Map pane bitmap output maximum resolution increased to 30,000 pixels from 20,000.
(May 27/10) Animation camera is tracked on the map pane during animation previews and frame bitmaps output.
(May 27/10) Closed camera paths cause last frame to be left out, to allow proper looped video output.
(April 20/10) Map to Bitmap command includes fine-grained progress reporting for TIFF format output.
(April 17/10) Map to Bitmap command lets output image resolution be greater than the document's.
(March 11/10) Negative elevations were always being rounded upwards during GDAL-based heightfield exports; fixed.
(March 11/10) One-degree SRTM files (HGT) can be exported (using GDAL).
(March 1/10) Some operations involving shape rasterization use 1-bit instead of 8-bit masks, saving memory.
(January 18/10) General-purpose DXF shape importer added (using GDAL OGR).
(January 7/10) The mousewheel can zoom the scene pane.
(December 21/09) Shapes, Import... command uses GDAL OGR library, allowing more file formats and options.
(December 21/09) WCS ELEV exporter encodes longitudes using 180-degree space instead of 360, making imports to VNS more intuitive.
(December 8/09) User-specific data files can optionally be stored in a folder defined during installation.
(November 24/09) Filesystem pathspec errors are described better.
(November 10/09) ArcInfo ASCII files can now import with local coordsys if no associated .prj file is available.
(October 17/09) Length of selected shape reported on vector shape status panel.
(October 8/09) User-specific data files (preferences, textures, caches, renditions, etc.) moved from application folder to user's My Documents/Daylon Graphics/Leveller/4.3.
(August 25/09) Raytraced sun disc appears smoother, shadows compute faster.
(July 15/09) Raytraced directional waves deploy nondirectional bump pattern more appropriately (e.g., scaling them down at smaller wavelengths).
(July 9/09) Gaps between heightfield rendered slabs of different LOD are filled in.
(June 9/09) Tip of the Day dialog offers navigable topic categories, backwards controls, and picture inclusion.
(June 9/09) POV-Ray export includes shadows for camera-facing billboard objects.
(June 6/09) Filter plug-in edits use a backing store if small enough.
(May 30/09) Deleting a floating selection no longer tags the heightfield as needing to be redrawn.
(May 29/09) Minimize and shutdown options added to animation bitmap frames output dialog (this is more useful when using the raytracing or normal appearance mode).
(May 21/09) Preview Animation dialog positions itself as much off the scene pane as possible, and is also smaller to make more room.
(May 17/09) Raytracer includes textured billboard reference shapes, if they are visible. This lets you, e.g., render high-quality forested courses.
(May 5/09) Using the Zoom and Pan tools on the scene pane zoom and pan the scene instead of rotating the camera around the heightfield.
(April 30/09) The full pressure resolution of graphics tablets is used, instead of being mapped to 1,024 steps.
(April 28/09) If the water is textured, the raytracer will render the texture. The raytracer also blends water opacity with the transparency caused by fresnel reflection.
(April 20/09) When a document is saved, it includes (if possible) the settings for the scene's "Normal" appearance and the map's appearance, which it can then automatically apply when opened. The settings being stored depend on which of a document's windows is the active window.
(April 20/09) If Leveller cannot find or load a linked file, such as a texture or reference shapes file, it will let you choose to abort opening a document or open without the linked file. It also shows the linked file's name.
(April 20/09) Heightfield texture and colormap, water texture and reference shapes are now document entities instead of view entities. This makes loading these items happen automatically when a document is opened instead of needing to save and associate a view file.
(March 5/09) Changing the selection state of a document's vector shapes no longer needlessly updates the scene display, making workflow smoother.
(March 5/09) The Setup program would abort if it couldn't register filetype information. This has been changed to display a warning instead, allowing installation on systems that don't allow changes to the root part of the Windows registry (although this will cause the application's document icons to be described plain and to appear plain).
(March 5/09) Map Navigator dialog no longer flickers when resized.
(February 10/09) Raytracing uses a new renderer engine, which supports multithreading and megatexture heightfield coloration driven by the new vector shapes facility.
(February 10/09) System shutdown for raytacing to disk works better.
(February 10/09) Raytracer auto-saves still renders into the $/renditions folder.
(February 10/09) Unused measurement units can be ommitted from unit choice fields, making units easier to choose.

Removed Features

(July 26/24) Noise plug-in brush removed; it was just an SDK tool demonstrator and its functionality can be obtained using a custom brush. Unless one has more tool plug-ins than the ones in the standard distribution, the plug-ins toolbar no longer appears either.
(July 19/24) The "Render OpenGL-compliant drape textures at full resolution" preference ("Quality texturing" in the Properties panel) has been removed, since drawing of such textures is fully handled by GPU shaders.
(July 3/24) Legacy toolbars (main, editing, brushes, vectors) removed.
(July 1/24) Continuous brushing (interpolating points between mouse events) feature removed; too slow to be useful.
(June 7/24) GUI scaling preference overridden by Windows display scaling setting.
(February 3/24) "Shapes, Basics..." command removed since its settings were moved to the Shape Properties dialog.
(January 31/24) File, Preferences, Folders... command removed, since Windows offers its own favorite folders facility.
(January 31/24) Obsolete tips removed from Tip of the Day dialog.
(January 30/24) About Plug-ins dialog no longer shows the unused "Renderers" category.
(January 28/24) Unreferenced documentation images removed.
(December 11/23) Legacy scanline renderer documentation removed.
(December 4/23) Memory copy option removed from Advanced Preferences dialog's Memory page.
(November 14/23) Legacy raytracer documentation removed.
(July 22/20) Installer doesn't query registry for unnecessary program groups; fixes problem where some Windows systems would raise an error.
(June 2/11) Display list usage dropped from dynamic LOD renderer, mipmap storage now implicit, child tile texture copying dropped.
(May 19/11) Scanline renderer and plug-in renderers removed.
(December 3/10) Legacy raytracer deprecated, as the new raytracer pretty much is an effective replacement.
(August 2/10) View, Raytrace, Output Megatexture... command removed; no longer necessary. To build megatexture content, check "Build needed tiles" in the advanced raytracer settings.
(June 24/10) Marker Output plug-in removed; will most likely be superceded by plug-ins that can access vector shape information.
(June 24/10) Marker tool removed; superceded by the vector shape tools.
(February 10/09) Support for displacement map reference shapes removed. This refshape type was only an experimental feature and accidentally left in, but wasn't functional.