Fractalization question and Trace weirdness
Rosemont_Line
🖼️ 1 images Traveler
So, recently, I decided to re-draw the main landmass my fictional country map (in the "Modern Political" style, which was the June 2010 annual issue). The reason for this was because the landmasses were originally created quite a while ago, and have way too many sharp edges and pointy bits that look unnatural - since beginning this project, I've gotten much better at mapping in general, and came to see this flaw. So, using the old landmass as a reference, I redrew it, but made the coastlines much more smooth and more "bumpy" instead of angular.
The problem, of course, is this means it's now REALLY fractalized, and it was a huge landmass to begin with. Hitting "Zoom Extents" with the new, more fractalized landmass with effects off now takes as long to load as the old (less fractalized) version of the landmass with effects on.
1) Is there ANY way around this? Something I could do to simply help the program itself out, so that it won't take ages to load and redraw while I work? If not, I may have to go back to the older version of the map (I saved a version before doing the re-draw as a separate file, fortunately), at least for now. That's only a temporary solution, though. Which brings me to:
2) This is a question that might only be answerable by someone who actually works for ProFantasy, but: My understanding from reading what was posted in the relevant thread is that CC3 Plus will help with exactly this issue (among other improvements of course!). That the program will be faster and better able to handle something like this. Is that correct? And that same thread also said the hope was that it might be out by April - is that still a strong possibility? I'm thinking, if the answer to both parts of this question is "yes", then I might just try to hold out by continuing to work on my older map with jagged coastlines until Plus is out, and then re-do the landmasses once I have access to the newer software.
Beyond that: there is some kind of crazy issue going on with the trace command. When I try to select the coastline as the entity to trace, this happens:
(click here for a full-sized version of this image)
The "Pick Starting Point" line jumps way off into the lower left area of the map, as you can see. No matter where I move the mouse, the starting point will not go anywhere near where I'm actually trying to trace (in this screenshot, I was actually working in the upper right area of the main landmass when I clicked trace). If I start IN the lower left area when I click trace, the effect is reversed: the cursor jumps way over to the right.
This behavior does NOT occur when I load up the older version of the map (before re-drawing and adding all of that fractalization). Could the problem somehow have been caused by said fractalization?
The problem, of course, is this means it's now REALLY fractalized, and it was a huge landmass to begin with. Hitting "Zoom Extents" with the new, more fractalized landmass with effects off now takes as long to load as the old (less fractalized) version of the landmass with effects on.
1) Is there ANY way around this? Something I could do to simply help the program itself out, so that it won't take ages to load and redraw while I work? If not, I may have to go back to the older version of the map (I saved a version before doing the re-draw as a separate file, fortunately), at least for now. That's only a temporary solution, though. Which brings me to:
2) This is a question that might only be answerable by someone who actually works for ProFantasy, but: My understanding from reading what was posted in the relevant thread is that CC3 Plus will help with exactly this issue (among other improvements of course!). That the program will be faster and better able to handle something like this. Is that correct? And that same thread also said the hope was that it might be out by April - is that still a strong possibility? I'm thinking, if the answer to both parts of this question is "yes", then I might just try to hold out by continuing to work on my older map with jagged coastlines until Plus is out, and then re-do the landmasses once I have access to the newer software.
Beyond that: there is some kind of crazy issue going on with the trace command. When I try to select the coastline as the entity to trace, this happens:
(click here for a full-sized version of this image)
The "Pick Starting Point" line jumps way off into the lower left area of the map, as you can see. No matter where I move the mouse, the starting point will not go anywhere near where I'm actually trying to trace (in this screenshot, I was actually working in the upper right area of the main landmass when I clicked trace). If I start IN the lower left area when I click trace, the effect is reversed: the cursor jumps way over to the right.
This behavior does NOT occur when I load up the older version of the map (before re-drawing and adding all of that fractalization). Could the problem somehow have been caused by said fractalization?
Comments
The Map Border is a very thin black line along the very edges of the map - it's quite subtle. I haven't made any changes to it - it's what this mapping style ("Modern Political") has for a border out-of-the-box, so to speak. The "Map Border" layer and sheet being hidden or frozen or not seemed to make no difference.
Interestingly, I tried something else - I tried to trace a different landmass (one that HADN'T been redrawn to be super heavily fractalized), but on the same map. No problems; the trace function worked perfectly normally through several instances of trying to use it. So, the problem is with THIS landmass itself, and isn't some kind of problem affecting the whole map. I still wonder if somehow, the increased fractalization itself is somehow causing the issue. It's hard to ignore that this problem began as soon as I finished the re-draw.
The trace issue aside, it seemed the landmass was just too complex now anyway to the point of making the program too hard to use. I was trying to think of some kind of trick or loophole I could use to maintain the shape and size of the landmass, super fractalization and all, while allowing me to still work. There are actually two entities that make up the landmass: the blue line surrounding the coast, and the filled polygon that makes up the land itself. Hiding the "Relief/Contours" layer (containing the polygon) did nothing to help, but interestingly, if I keep just the "Coast/Sea" layer hidden (which has the blue coastline), things do get much faster. Almost back to "normal" speeds while working, zooming out, etc. This is odd, since both entities are, as far as I can tell, equally fractalized, but hey, if it works...
Of course, the trace issue is still present, which is a shame, because if not for that, I think I might be able to work on the map like this!
I would try using REDN (Remove Nodes) on the coastline. Do it once, try the trace, if still doesn't work, repeat.
"Remove Nodes" was one of those tools that I'd never used and didn't really know the function of, so I probably wouldn't have thought to try it for this. You were not only right in terms of it solving the tracing issue (now I can select trace when using whatever drawing tool and the starting point selector will actually be in the right area!), but this also solved the other issue! Having applied Remove Nodes on the coast line and the landmass polygon once each, the program is now perfectly usable again, with zoom and redraw speeds being almost as fast as they were before I redid the landmass in the first place. So I can not only trace properly, I can keep my redrawn, more fractalized landmass and continue to work! Yes, applying REDN did undo a bit of the complex natural "bumpiness" that I went to the trouble of adding with the redraw, but just a bit - the difference is not very noticeable. Here is the redrawn coastline before applying REDN (using this version slows everything way down and screws up Trace), and here is the redrawn coastline after one shot of REDN (fixing the slowdown and Trace issues). As you can see, not a huge difference, and really, for the slight difference that is present, I think it looks better this way anyway, because I'd been thinking before that - considering that this map is supposed to be the "main" map of the whole country (meaning, it's not meant to show lots of fine little zoomed-in details, but to be an overview map you can look at to see the whole place) -I might have overdone it just a bit anyway for this scale of map (all the little innumerable bumps I added weren't even really visible when the map was zoomed out).
Thanks much!
Another idea has come to me. Gonna play around with some stuff and report back in this thread once I know whether or not it will work.
Full disclosure, I haven't done this before but it should work. Work with a copy of the map. I know that when I created my world map, there were places where I put lots and lots of nodes in, and others where I didn't. My guess is you did the same and when you fractilized + REDN, the simpler areas got below some threshold, but the more complex areas didn't.
Yeah, REDN is a pretty magical command. It's the kind of command that you don't need until you need it (I remember scratching my head when I read it, wondering why anyone would use it!)
Steve