I have spent the last few days migrating the old RTEncoder.com website to this new software. The site had been running on a hand-coded XHTML/CSS design. I decided to move to a Wordpress/CMS type of setup to make updating the website much easier … meaning I no longer have to ssh into the server to edit the pages. The most recent versions of Wordpress have made running a small website like this one much easier, where the majority of the pages are fairly static, but still with a news type of section that takes advantage of the blogging features in Wordpress.

Why update this old site now? Glad you asked. I have finally restarted development on RTEncoder 2.0. This is all new code written in .Net/C# and is coming together very well. I’ll post more on that in the coming days.

If you notice any problems with the new site please let us know.

I have posted a new version of RTEncoder for download. This is only a minor patch with no major functionality changes. Here is the text from the changelog:

• Added better detection of future versions of RTE files
• Changing the Encode/Decode radio buttons now clears the selected files
• Fixed a potential crash when the source file is an invalid RTE file

Please see the Downloads page to get the new version.

I added a few translation links at the top of the home page for our foreign visitors. Hopefully the automatic Google translation actually helps, more than it translates into something really embarrassing. Let me know how it works for you.

A quick update on the development progress of RTEncoder version 2. I completed a major reorganization of much of the core code. The main RTEncoder 2 engine has been completed, along with a complete unit test suite. The design of the file format for the version 2 RTE files has been completed, and I am currently working on the code to read and write to that format, along with the unit tests for that code.

I’ve added some more entries to the FAQ, including a new section for RTEncoder version 2. At this point I am still hoping to have an early testing version of 2.0 out later this month. Check back for the latest news.

Today I finished a redesign of the downloads page. Now there is a nice clean table hosting the files for download along with some information on the file. This is (hopefully) in preparation for actually listing new files in the future.

Today I added a PayPal Donate button to the sidebar. This is a decision I’ve been thinking about quite a bit while working on RTEncoder 2.0. Honestly, I had been thinking about making a “Basic” and a “Professional” version, giving away the Basic version for free, and charging a small fee for the Professional version. I would really rather not bother with two separate versions though, and would really like to make all the features fully available for free. I hope this compromise will be the best of all worlds for all of us.

If you use RTEncoder and find it useful to you, especially if you make money using it, please consider making a small donation to help fund it’s continued development. Thank you.

Just a quick update on RTEncoder 2.0. I have pretty much finished the inner core utility classes and have been working on the actual encoding engine. I’d say it’s about 80% complete at the moment. So far, all of my 40 or so automated unit tests of the code pass on both the Windows and Mac platforms. The next steps are more unit tests for the engine, need to work on the RTE header reading and writing, and finally backward compatibility with version 1.0 RTE files.

The day job is still keeping me pretty slammed, but I’m trying to make slow and steady progress on RTEncoder 2.0 as I can. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to email me.

Development of RTEncoder 2.0 is still going well. I’m currently still working on the inner core processing functionality. I hope to finish that piece up in a week or two, and validate all the code against my automated test cases on both Windows and the Mac. I’ll try to keep you updated on the development progress as I can.

Also, I’ve done a bit of HTML code cleanup on the site and now have all the pages validating under the XHTML 1.1 specification. Please let me know if you find any visual problems on any of the pages so I can tell you to upgrade your browser.

All the announcements are posted, and rtencoder.com is officially open! Yeah, I know … lot’s of work still to be done, and I need more FAQ’s, so if you have any about the current version, please email me. I made the announcement post at PoserPros, Renderosity and 3D Commune.