News for June/July/August 2023

New Workstation

All of the components are finally here for my new workstation.
I decided to go with the 24-Core Xeon W7-2495X processor, instead of the 16-Core or 20-Core model, as I may as well go all-in and get the top W2400 processor.
The W7-2495X has 24 P-Cores and it readily beats the i9-13900K with its 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores in multi-threaded workloads.
I had a difficult time getting the full amount of memory that I wanted, which was 1TB or more. I had to settle on 512GB since 8x 64GB RDIMMs was all that is readily available at this time.
I am hoping that the 128GB and 256GB DDR5 ECC RDIMMs will be hitting market over the next couple of years so that I can upgrade the memory to the full 2TB.
I am planning on creating three videos for my YouTube channel Tech Show section, showing the components and build of the workstation.

New Services

As soon as I have the new workstation build completed, I will be adding new services to the Services page on the web site.
The new workstation with 512GB of memory will allow me to work on large point-clouds and heightmaps up to 370,000 x 370,000 pixels.
When I can upgrade to 2TB then I can manage heightmaps up to 730,000 x 730,000 pixels.
The new services will include massive terrain heightmap conversion, creation, editing, stitching, and tiling, all for very inexpensive pricing so that it is affordable to everyone.

TerreSculptor Updates

The total number of supported file formats has now reached more than 160, with additional 64-bit TIF and GeoTIF format support.
The next build release of TerreSculptor will include an upgrade to Microsoft dotNET 4.7 from 4.6.
Microsoft dotNET 4.7 is included with Windows 10 as of the Creators Update in April 2017, and is of course also in Windows 11.
dotNET 4.7 is supposed to include new features for improved Windows 10/11 High DPI Screen Scaling support for WinForms applications such as TerreSculptor.
I will be implementing any changes for 4.7’s better support over the next few builds.

TerreSculptor Scaling

Out of the 150,000+ total combined installations of the free TerreSculptor 2.0 and retail TerreSculptor 3.0, I have had two people with really strange 4K monitor Screen Scaling issues.
On their displays, even when they switch to 100% Scale on the Display Settings in Windows 10/11, the TerreSculptor dialogs are still scaled and zoomed and stretched to 140%+, and usually distorted in shape.
It is as if their system has some really odd Font scaling setting.
So this causes issues on some of the dialogs with the custom controls and viewports.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to fix this issue for these two people, so I recommend that anyone interested in TerreSculptor be sure to try out the free 2.0, or 3.0 in demo mode, to make sure that the software renders correctly on your display.
Microsoft dotNET 4.7 is supposed to have additional features to support custom controls with better High DPI Screen Scaling, so I am researching this now to see what I can do to support these outliers with their display issues.

-eof-