Fractal Terrains 3 saved world problem

jcracquet

I just upgraded to Fractal Terrains 3 and I'm having a weird problem. When I imported my old ftw file, the world was completely different... I mean completely. Oddly, the rivers are all in the correct places. Some are on ground, some are on water. It doesn't seem to be a question of water level or any other obvious issue that I can find. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Any ideas? I have no idea how to recover my world in the upgraded version.

jslayton

The only thing I can think of offhand that might have caused this sort of behavior is if the "use version 1.23 compatibility" flag was checked in the ftw file from the older version. This flag caused the system to recreate a bug from one of the earliest versions of FT that was both OS and system speed dependent. This flag has been removed in FT3. I consider this case unlikely, though, as it would have required user intervention to set the flag from the user interface.

More likely is that the fractal function, seed or other parameters are different than those originally used to generate the file. This problem should not occur. It might possibly occur in the case where the file used one of the DLL-based fractal functions and that DLL is not available. The way to test for this is to verify that the dropdown list on the Fractal Function page in World Settings has only the "Ridged Multifractal" and "Brownian Noise" options listed. There should be more options than just those two.

jcracquet

My old version is 2.2, if it helps. Under Fractal Function, I have four options:
Ridged Multifractional
Brownian Noise
Wilbur Fractional Brownian Motion (fBM)
Wilbur Ridged Multifractional.
My world is created using the third one (fBM). I certainly haven't set any flags as you describe. The seed and all the obvious parameters seem to match up.

jcracquet

update: I thought I would be clever, trying to save the "wrong" map in the new version and import it back into the old to check out the results. It completely crashed the old.
This seems to be because though I save in the "new" version with "Wilbur Fractional Brownian Motion (fBm)", upon reloading it immediately switches to "fBm Perlin's Improved Noise". To compound the dilemma, changing between these two settings in the new version doesn't seem to have any visible effect upon the map.
So now I'm really confused. All I can think is that "Wilbur Fractional Brownian Motion (fBm)" isn't supported in the new version, even though it's clearly an option...?
FYI, also checked out the "parms" button (under fraction function) to see if those three settings were the same in both versions of FT, and the numbers match.

jslayton

Your Method drop list should have 7 items on it:
Ridged Multifractal
Brownian Noise
fBm with Perlin's Improved Noise
RMF with Perlin's Improved Noise
Voronoi Ridged Multifractal
Wilbur Fractional Brownian Motion (fBm)
Wilbur Ridged Multifractal

If you select "Brownian Noise", does your original world appear?

jcracquet

No, it doesn't. When I load my old world in the new version, my method list has:
Ridged Multifractal
Brownian Noise
FT2 fBm
FT2 Ridged Multifractal
fBm with Perlin's Improved Noise
RMF with Perlin's Improved Noise
Voronoi Ridged Multifractal
Wilbur Fractional Brownian Motion (fBm)
Wilbur Ridged Multifractal
None of these bring the old world back...?

jslayton

Very odd. There shouldn't be FT2 types on there at all. I'm not sure what happened to your world. Could you zip up the file and get it to ProFantasy tech support so that I can take a look at it?

kristof65

Joe,

I'm having a similar issue. I have a world that was originally done in FT1.23. On my FT2, I have to check the 1.23 check box to work with it.

I cannot get it to work with FT3 at all. I can use FT2 to Burn Into Surface, but I lose a lot of detail.

As this is my primary campaign world with lots of effort put into it, I really need a solution for this.

When I load my old world, I can't find any means to change the method, but when I go to generate a new world in FT3, I see the FT2 types as well.

Chris

jslayton

The version 1.23 compatibility feature was removed in FT3 to allow for architectural changes needed for the new version.

I'll see what happened about the FT2 types; they really shouldn't be there as they are redundant with the first two items on the list.

kristof65

So is there any way to use my 1.23 world in FT3?

crlamb

I had a world that wouldn't load in FT3, although it must have been for different reasons. I played around with ways to get it to transfer and ended up saving it as a special MDR file in the old FT, and then starting a new world in FT3 and using that special MDR file as the binary file for the world. It seemed to work OK.