I have partitioned the 1000+ major future updates for TerreSculptor into about 50 named “Updates”. You may have seen me mention them previously, such as the Terrain Stack Update and the BigArray Update.
The Terrain Stack Update is going well, development is occurring quicker than expected. I had set aside Q3/Q4 of 2022 for the Terrain Stack Update, and I already have a well functioning Alpha level build of the system, and we are just getting to the end of Q2. This will hopefully mean that the rest of the Updates will be able to be bumped up by one or two Q’s in the development timeline.
One of the big issues that I keep bumping into is the poor design of the Microsoft Windows Imaging APIs for both subformat support and for maximum image file sizes.
Many GeoTIF images simply aren’t supported by the Windows API, and the limits to the maximum image sizes such as 32767×32767 for 16-bit grayscale is just really a joke.
So I have been looking into both libpng and libtif as a means to be able to add better functionality to the PNG and TIF Importers and Exporters. Since these are large libraries, it is going to take some time to get these systems fully integrated into TerreSculptor with full image support.
These file format libraries will be implemented during the File Format Update, which will also see the initial build support for EXR and FBX formats. The EXR and FBX format support will most likely be limited to just the relevant subformats that are useful for heightmaps. For example, the EXR half-float format will most likely not be supported initially.
I have been tracking my latest YouTube video creation cycles, and I typically spend about 4 hours per finished minute in research, scripting, and editing of videos. This means that a 10 minute video will require about 40 hours of work.
I have been aiming at one to two videos per week, which means typically sharing equal time between video creation and software development, if I work 16 to 18 hours a day plus weekends (because of the time also spent on my regular income earning job).
The push to get the YouTube channel more popular is an attempt to eventually make that an additional revenue source. The Patreon income doesn’t quite cover the Adobe subscription, which is used for content creation. So the other expenses such as web hosting, google drive, and software development tools still come out-of-pocket for me. Which totals a few thousand dollars per year. That doesn’t even account for my time spent in creating all of this. One day we will get there…