This is issue #169 of the Dogwaffler of the Moment, our sporadic newsletter about Project Dogwaffle.
June 2020: June Lake
This edition and other issues of the newsletter can be found here with more content:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/newsletter
There's a lake in California, called June Lake. Who knows, perhaps there's even more than one with that name. It's big state. We've visited one of them a while ago, not far from Mono Lake and a popular skiing resort, along highway 395.
June lake. It's just a name, but it came to our minds. Why? Well because we're already in June, the last month of the first half of this year that turned out so very different than we anticipated.
And we do love nature paintings and renderings with pretty lakes. And June lake is known for particularly pretty sceneries. There's also Gull lake, Silver lake, and a few more. It's north of Mammoth. South of Mono lake. And way South of Lake Tahoe. The whole area is bustling with scenic beauty and name recognition. No wonder we thought of June lake when we realized it's already June.
If you'd like to see some pretty pictures of lakes, just search the web for June Lake. You'll be surprised also to see the village's architecture looking a lot like Switzerland's chalets. Sweet!
This may not be your vision of June lake. Use your imagination. Add daylight, spring flowers and trees etc...
New Builds and a Release of PD Howler
2020 - now build #53
We're
now shipping build 53 for PD Howler 2020. Last time we made a
change it was build 47. You can read about what's new in the
subsequent builds here:
https://www.thebest3d.com/2020
https://www.thebest3d.com/2020
In build 48 (undocumented), we had some internal code changes. New dev system. Had to make sure it all still compiles and works.
In Build 49, we made improvements for working better with large images. The time it took for getting the undo images was too long. We added multithreading and other tricks, it's much faster now. More was needed...
In Build 50 we improved the counterpart, the decompression of undo images from the history stack. Sweet, now you get real-time previews even on 4k resolutions.
A few more tweaks and builds, and we landed with build 53 - some great improvements in Howler's Particle Modeler. We added a collection of Sprites and you can add your own PNG images too. We included this:
Particle Pack 1.1 by Kenney Vleugels at www.kenney.nl
If you develop for games, you might like this.
So we've been shipping build 53. And already we're continuing with further improvements. Build 54 has been seen but not released. More to come.
Hold the Presses! we have another update!
Howler is now at release build 56! here's latest checksum data
Name: Howler_2020_0056.exe
Size: 127,804,152 bytes (121 MiB)
CRC32: 2B522FBD
CRC64: 367CA2AA8AA26643
SHA256: 9DE0B6AD4569650C402FCFC1C6D0C19ACC637EE96D62669C24D4F7F83C22C538
SHA1: CF3CB345B603C2486654B799BF3735D0CBBCD073
BLAKE2sp: 8DB926B0820415E12DCF8312897B48D671F9B3CB17F35C7A6D88320C7D0F81DA
What's new in build 56? A few things, mostly internal, but one big thing" Stored Images are no longer kept in memory. They won't waste your precious RAM, so you can focus on better, larger images. PLUS, they're kept on disk in the Temp folder so if there's a power loss, a crash or other incident causing Howler to go down, your stored images won't be lost, they'll still be on disk and you can recover them when restarting Howler.
The Return of the
Store_Buffer plugin
You may recall that for many years, storing an image in a thumbnail placeholder resulted in a free-floating thumbnail image, that could be used to restore the image. It also was resizable. And it had the Color Palette mode, meaning thet you could use the currently loaded image as the color palette.
Last year we made some changes to the way the images are stored. We arranged them in a vertical scrolling window. This helped clean things up a bit, but also made it impossible to resize it. The Color Palette mode was kept intact. But if you were on a high-resolution graphics card, the stored thumbnails could be small'ish, and we started to miss that resizing option.
Someone then asked if there was a way to display colors used by Bob Ross, and yes of course we can but we also found it might be more convenient to have the option to resize the palette.
So we brought it back. We updated the plugin called Store_Buffer. It doesn't interfere with the new stored images. You can still use that too.
To learn more about it, check this link:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/download/store-image-for-floating-color-palette/index.html
More French Help
Documentation Added!
Xavier Legendre, a French photographer and user of Dogwaffle, has translated the remaining dozen or so of chapters from the P{PD Help files.
Look here for the new and updated French Help Docs -
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/help/French
