By some miracle, after 5 years of being at a technical impasse with this project, this year’s effort at resurrection has unexpectedly proven successful.
Back in the 2019/20 upgrade cycle, the scene lighting in the app stopped working altogether with (I think) the iOS 13 SDK update, despite no code changes, and in the absence of any documented changes in the behaviour of SceneKit, the 3D SDK used in the app. After endless hours of trying workarounds and reconfigurations, nothing solved it.
Every year since, I’ve tried dusting things off to see if it might work once again with later iOS SDK versions, and this year - completely unexpectedly - it did! I can only assume that some internal SceneKit regression was finally fixed in iOS 18.
So, this version is basically the same app as before, dusted off, and with some updates for modern iOS versions and devices, plus a fix for the longstanding “Open in TPE 3D - Locating…” bug, which I was unable to address for all this time because of the unexplained lighting issues.
If you’re on a modern device with > 4GB of RAM, you should notice that maps are significantly crisper than before - with more memory available, we can load 512px tiles instead of the 256px tiles we used previously:
I couldn’t wait to try out TPD 3D Version 1.5. I have 1.4b76 currently installed on my iPhone 12Pro. The iPone is on autoupdate but I don’t get V1.5.
Even worse I cant find TPE 3D not at all in the German Appstore. Search their only gives me TPE 4.15.1 which I have on my iPhone already installed as well.
Hi Jörg - in the long period where I was unable to update the app, there ended up being a bit of a pile on of one-star reviews in Germany, so I decided to remove it there.
I could look at adding it back, but I’ll need to come up with charming, convincing review replies to my detractors .
The invitation for Testflight has arrived and I have installed V1.5.1 on my iPad Pro (13", M4). So far, it is working as expected. The data transfer from the old app respectively from my account worked flawlessly.
Unfortunately, the ß version replaces the old version 1.4 and is not installed in parallel. That’s why I haven’t installed the ß on my iPhone yet. I use it when taking photos in the field, and there’s a lunar eclipse this weekend. I don’t want to risk the app crashing while I’m out and about.
However, I will use the beta version to prepare for the shoot at home. Maybe there will be more to report next week.
I have one more question: How do I change the map material in the display in the iOS/iPad app?
Haven’t seen any crashes so far with 1.5.1, so it should be safe to install.
There’s only one map type included in TPE 3D at present.
(That will likely change in the future, it so will the purchase model - the recurring costs of map tiles are too high to sustain a one time purchase model.)
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