News
Website Contribute Updated (October 12, 2002)
Report a Bug and Make a Request links now send a an e-mail to the mailing list.
Demeter 3.15 Released (October 7, 2002)
Distribution now includes C++ projects for Visual Studio Dot Net, as well as Visual C++ 6 and UNIX'es. Dot Net runtime support and terrain paging are still disabled, but will be available again very soon.
New Website Design (October 1, 2002)
TerrainEngine.com receives a major face lift.
Demeter 3.14 Released (September 29, 2002)
Demeter is now a single, unified distribution for both Windows and Unix/Linux systems. You can now optionally download the Win32 Dependencies (in case you don't already have the 3rd party libraries) and the Sample Data package (to run the sample applications that come with the Demeter package).
The documentation has been updated at to reflect the new architecture.
"Painter" Detail Textures (February 16, 2002)
With release 3.9 of Demeter, you can now have any number of unique detail textures in different areas of your terrains. You are no longer constrained to a single detail texture that covers the entire terrain. Release 3.9 even includes an alpha version of an editor application that lets you "paint" detail textures on your terrains for use at runtime in your application.
Dramatic Performance Enhancements (February 16, 2002)
Demeter was already fast, but release 3.9 adds compiled vertex arrays and improved CLOD heuristics, making Demeter anywhere from 1.5 to 3 times faster than previous releases on tested systems. The improvements to CLOD also handle camera rolling and pitching intelligently.
Direct Support for DEM, SDTS and Other Digital Elevation Data Files (January 9, 2002)
Demeter now directly reads a variety of digital elevation data file formats, including SDTS, DEM, ArcGrid, and more.
SDL Dependency Optional (January 9, 2002)
Demeter can now be used either with or without SDL.
Procedural Texture Support (November 29, 2001)
You can now manage terrain textures yourself by creating your own implementation of Demeter's abstract TextureFactory class. This makes it easy to add such things as procedural textures to your applications.
Dynamic Terrain Paging (September 20, 2001)
Demeter now fully supports terrain "paging", which means you can tile together any number of Terrains to make extremely large worlds. Terrains are loaded and unloaded as needed, so only the visible portion of the world is in the user's RAM at a given moment. Demeter ensures that adjacent terrains join seamlessly, even during dynamic tessellation. This has been the most requested feature to date, so enjoy!
Dynamic Vertex Support (August 27, 2001)
Added public methods to get and set vertex elevations. The terrain vertices have always been dynamic, but these public methods should make it easier for applications to change them.
Open Scene Graph Support (July 14, 2001)
Release 3.0 of Demeter adds support for Open Scene Graph. This makes it easy to place culture, vegetation, vehicles, buildings, or anything else on your Demeter terrains. See http://openscenegraph.org for more about Open Scene Graph, and get version 3.0 of Demeter to start using it.
HTTP support (July 1, 2001)
Added the ability to get terrain data from remote HTTP servers (as well as local files.)
Major speed and memory optimizations in new release (June 11, 2001)
Huge performance optimizations now make Demeter run 6 times faster than in the previous releases (on average.) Memory usage has also been greatly reduced, allowing easy creation of huge terrains (see the screenshots section.) You should definitely upgrade to release 2.4 as soon as possible.
Demeter is now hosted on SourceForge (May 28, 2001)
All releases and CVS access are now hosted by the good people at SourceForge. This page remains Demeter's home, but SourceForge will be used for releases, feedback, and CVS access. Click on the link above to go to the Demeter project page at SourceForge.
Added support for JPEG, allowing map sizes to be 30 times smaller (May 27, 2001)
Terrain texture and elevation maps now use the SDL_image library, so you can use JPEG files, which can be extremely small even for large maps. In addition to JPEGs, you can use .bmp, .png, .gif, .tiff, or any other format supported by the SDL_image library. The ability to have smaller textures makes Demeter easier to use over the Internet. To demonstrate, the sample application has been reduced to a 450K file (down from its original size of 15 megs!)
Portability issues addressed (May 20, 2001)
The SDL include path and the Windows projects have been updated to address some build problems related to Visual C++.
Better handling of fog (May 20, 2001)
Fog has been moved out of Demeter and into the calling application where it belongs. Demeter no longer interferes with the application's fog settings.
Fixed Screen Resolution Problem in Sample Application (May 18, 2001)
The sample application is now more polite about restoring your desktop to its original resolution when it exits.
Better Support for All Linux Distributions (May 12, 2001)
Standard Makefiles have been added to the Linux source archive and CVS. Building Demeter and the sample application is now as simple as untarring the tar file and typing "make all." Those bad old custom build scripts are now a thing of the past. This should allow Demeter and the sample app to build and run on any OS that supports 'make' (which includes virtually every UN!X known to man.)
Thanks very much to Franck Guillaud for letting me know that this badly needed to be done.