DTT Upgrade Guide

In March 2011, many contributors helped in developing what was called the "direct-to-tiles" or "dtt-c-render" branch. This branch is significantly faster than the old version of Overviewer, and has a few nice extra features. This guide is aimed at helping people who are already familiar with Overviewer get up to speed on the new changes.

(For a much more detailed list, with every commit, see here.)

Using overviewer.py

The first thing to note is that gmap.py (or gmap.exe) is now called overviewer.py (or, similarly, overviewer.exe). So if you used to run ./gmap.py [options ...], now you would run ./overviewer.py [options ...].

Along with the name change, some of the options have also changed. If Overviewer quits saying an option isn't recognized, run ./overviewer.py --help to see if it may have been renamed. Here's the big changes:

• --lighting, --night, and --spawn have been combined into one option; use --rendermodes=lighting, etc. to change render mode. This can also be used to render more than one mode at once! See below for more information.

• Some options, like --zoom, --optimize-img, and --imgformat have been moved into a config file named settings.py. See below for more info on the config file.

• --cachedir is gone, because Overviewer no longer uses a chunk-level cache, and instead relies on tiles alone. See below for more information on why the cache is gone.

C Extension now Required

Rendermodes and Multi-layer Rendering

About settings.py

About the Chunk-based Cache