Vintyri Symbol Sets Update

I've been receiving a regular trickle of E-Mail focusing on two points regarding the free Vintyri Symbol Set Conversions for CC3+ and CC3:

1. The desire for improvement of colors in the already released Vintyri Symbol Set 2.

2. Impatient waiting for Vintyri Symbol Set 3, which includes artisans' and commercial buildings.

Please remember that the current download version of Vintyri Symbol Set 2 still is something like a ProFantasy early adopter version. We don't have a final release of Version 1.1 yet. When my helpers and I converted these symbols back in the year 2012, we didn't really understand the degree to which CD3 reduces the color depth in implementing internal roof shadowing. We do now. The Vintyri Symbol Set 3 symbols, which are my current project, have the same strong coloration as in the Vintyri symbol packages for Dundjinni (TM), Fractal Mapper (TM) 8, Adobe Photoshop (R) and The GIMP (R), with which some of you are familiar. The final release of Symbol Set 2 also will have this same strong coloration. I hope to release this version before the end of October ... at the latest in November. This improvement is not particularly time-consuming, so I don't think meeting that schedule should be a problem.

Whenever the Vintyri Project produces something, we ALWAYS have been far behind our projected timetable. With the Vintyri Symbol Set 3 conversions, I'm far ahead of my timetable, which has me positively astounded. Barring unforeseen problems, the first release should be out before the end of the month. That's neither a promise nor an announced release date, but it is a reasonable expectation. I know that some of you are quite eager to get these symbols, particularly the mills. Soon ... I think.

For the record, all of the Vintyri Symbol Set 3 symbols have been converted, all of the MAP files that define internal roof shadowing are finished and I'm now in the middle of making the catalogs (.FSC), defining control points and adding CD3 demographic colors. This isn't hard work, but it is a bit time-consuming and slow.

As for the "Known Issues" section of the PDF for Vintyri Symbol Set 2, this is very elusive. Some of our testers have these problem, some don't. We also have the problems here on a very modern PC with brand new installations of CC3, CC3+ and with both DD3 and CD3. This machine never has had any of the Vintyri products installed, but the problems manifest there too, suggesting that we're not the cause of the problems. ProFantasy knows about our issue report. Ralf was able to duplicate one of the two issues under CC3+ but he no long can with the latest CC3+ update. Two machines here continue to have both problems after the update (Version 3.68) was installed. At least one of my testers continues to have the issues after installing the new update. Two no longer have this issue after installing the new update.

In other words, for the time being, we're at a dead end. As a retired programmer, let me assure you that there's little that Ralf can do here. It's almost impossible to find the cause of a problem that one can't duplicate, and these issue don't crop up on the machines that Ralf uses.

There simply are some strange quirks that crop up some of the time with CC3 and CC3+. One of the things that makes catalog definitions here slow is the fact that my main, modern working computer can produce only a very small working window with the symbol editor of the symbol manager. The window is too small to make an adequate demographic color polygon. If I enlarge the edit window, it goes blank and then crashes both CC3 and CC3+. Why? Who knows? I don't know of anyone else who has this problem.

As a result I have to do the demographic coloring on an ancient laptop running Windows XP, where the edit window works perfectly. So it goes.

Finally, because I'm so far ahead of schedule, I do have hopes of also releasing Vintyri Symbol Set 4 for CC3 and CC3+ before the year's end. This set includes farm buildings, inns, breweries and brewhouses and other structures in the culinary area. Again, that's neither a promise nor an announced release date, but it is a reasonable expectation.

Happy weekend!

Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project

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