Laigter 1.7 Released

Laigter is an open source tool for Mac, Windows and Linux that enable you to create normal, parallax and specular maps for 2D sprites very easily.  This enables your 2D game to easily have a 3D effect, while also enabling more advanced lighting capabilities.  The 1.7 release contains a number of quality of life improvements such as better threading to improve UI responsiveness and auto reloading maps that have been modified externally.

Details of the release:

New Features:

  • Now Laigter auto-reloads images being modified from external program! This makes it easier for users that wanted to make the texture at the same time than the normal map. This also lets you modify custom heightmaps and specular maps externally and see results almost live! This was implemented by flamendless! (BTW, if you like indie horror games, you MUST play his game Going Home).
  • Now maps are generated in background thread, making GUI more responsive.
  • Now Laigter supports rendering multiple textures at the same time! Just Ctrl+click on the textures list, and every selected item will be rendered, and processed in real time! Note that they will be rendered at the same order they were selected. Once rendered, you can click on them in the preview widget, to move, scale, or change settings to them! You can also select multiple of them with Ctrl and modify the same setting to all of them at the same time! Check this twit if you want to see an example!

Minor Changes:

  • Updated About Dialog! This is because of new contributions and new Patreon. Thanks Lodugh! (By the way, check out Ldugh’s games, they are pretty cool).
  • Changed all code language to english. Users will not notice this, but this is helpful for people that wants to contribute coding.
  • Applied clang-format to all code. Same comment than previous item.
  • Added automatic generation of qm files, and removed them from git.
  • Grayed out “Add Light” button, when preview is not selected. That button often caused confusion when not in preview, because it entered the add light mode, but nothing was visible.
  • Added a contributing guide for new developers that want to help!
  • Now “Lights per texture” option is disabled by default. This made more sense for the new multiple texture feature.
  • Added “Preview” export option to export dock, and changed the behaviour of the export preview button in toolbar. Makes more sense now. Button in toolbar will export everything being rendered (except for lights icons), and the option in the dock will export the original texture with the processing applied.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed casting in shaders, that caused Laigter not to work with some glsl versions.
  • Fixed bug that caused “Cut” radio button not to work on some situations.

Translations:

  • Laigter is now translated to French! thanks to Calinou!

Laigter is available here, with the source code available on GitHub under the GPLv3 license.  You can learn more about an earlier version of Laigter in our video below.

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