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Issues with Fractal Terrains Coastline Quality

Darker_HomesDarker_Homes
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
I'm currently trying to export a full continent from Fractal Terrains for use in CC3+ but the coastline outline export that I'm doing is incredibly low quality. I've set the desired level of detail in the output map to be 1024, which is the highest it will go, but the coastline loses an incredible amount of detail if I do this.

One solution would be to zoom in and take multiple files and try to stitch them together, but I am really hoping to avoid doing that. Does anyone have any tips for me?
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Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    edited December 2019
    Did you check that the export setting change actually saved? FT3 currently stores these files in the installation directory, which due to Windows UAC usually silently fails to save unless you explicitly ran FT3 with admin privs (right click the chortcut and do run as administrator)
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  • Darker_HomesDarker_Homes
    Just tried again as admin, exact same problem. When I zoom in to the newly created CC3 file (for example, to a small island) the coastline has lost all detail.
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  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    If you're expecting a whole-world export from FT3 to CC3+ to preserve all of your data, that's not going to happen, sadly. FT3 would need to generate coastline entities with many millions of points in them, and its CC3+ export is capped at about 23000 points in a single entity. Your best bet is to do what most professional cartographers would do and to make multiple maps for CC3+ at different scales: a world map, possibly a regional map, and finally the local area map (such as your small island in the example). This sort of thing is common in most maps that you'll see because a map is all about being an abstraction of places that show details that are important to the purpose of the map (for example, in a map of "Great Battles of WW3", you're unlikely to see "Tim's partially submerged outhouse in lower Noravia" unless it's important to those battles).

    To get an idea of the scale of the problem, FT3 can easily zoom in to the point where each pixel on its display is a bit less than a kilometer across. That's about forty thousand unique samples across (it can go a bit higher, but this is a good number for discussion) and twenty thousand samples high for an Equirectangular projection. If only one percent of those eight hundred million pixels would generate a coastline element, then FT3 would be outputting eight million points just for coastlines. Such an export would (if CC3+ could draw it at all) be extremely slow to display and would contain more information than it would be possible to see on the display at once because CC3+ always tries to display everything that you've put into your map.
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  • Darker_HomesDarker_Homes
    Yeah I figured that. Sorry on the delay in getting back to you, I really appreciate the help!

    Basically, my idea was to give my players a map that was mega zoomed out, but if they wanted more info they could just zoom in to each region themselves. I'll just create them individually. Thanks again!
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