2005-07-27 Support for different heightmaps added

[Carsten]

Support for Terragen terrains and heightmaps in Portable Graymap format has been added.

The terrain subsystem of Ca3DE is now able to load terrains directly from Terragen (*.ter) terrain files as well as from Portable Graymap (*.pgm) heightmap images.

Both file formats are well supported by most terrain generation and editing tools and allow for an optimal work-flow for the artist, as no inconvenient and inherently problematic file format conversions are required any more: Create your new terrain with e.g. TerraFormer, edit it with Leveller, Terragen or any other program of your choice, and load it with one mouse click into CaWE for use with Ca3DE!

Another advantage over importing terrains from normal heightmap images in bmp, tga, png or jpeg file format (which continue to be supported) is that ter and pgm files support a full 16 bit precision of heightmap resolution!
That's 256 times as accurate as the other formats, and translates to a height precision of millimeters for moutains that are hundreds of meters high!
This allows you to get even the finest terrain details and structures into Ca3DE!

As always, all new features will be included with the next release.