Happy New Years!

Hope everyone is having a good holiday. Things have been crazy hectic for me, but as of right now all of the first round of Beta applications should have been replied to, and the second round just sent.

Beta Testers should monitor the Test forum for more details, but the first Beta executable will be released this week, probably in the next couple of days. It’s more or less ready to go right now, but I want to add a brief documentation page on some of the new features along with a couple examples to get folks rolling.

There’s still a variety of things that need to be added or fixed, particularily better import/export options in terms of file formats (more high precision formats), and some real goodies for later, but things are now at a state that you can get a good sense of what’s possible.

Lastly, a few folks were asking about the possibility of using Layout mode to build roads.. it’s not specifically designed to do so, but it’s certainly possible! Here’s one of the example files that will be included with the beta:

Layout Mode and a Layout Generator device was used to create some shapes for terrain that then drive fractal noise. Another Layout Generator is used with the optional terrain input hooked up to overlay the flat area and path into the terrain.. lastly all of the above is sent through erosion (masked to protect the road shapes from erosion) and textured.