Fractal Terrains - where does it automatically save maps in progress?
HelenAA
🖼️ 3 images Surveyor
I'm in search of enlightenment.
Where does FT automatically save maps in progress?
I much prefer to save ANY data file in a folder other than where the software defaults to and this applies to CC3+. I'm doing a world and I've set myself a week to do it in. FT insists on saving a LINK file in C:\Users\helen\Recent and thats all can find.
Comments
I don't think FT3 does an autosave, but I might be wrong.
If you save an FT3 map manually you give it a name and pick the folder where it ends up. There's no automatic selection as far as I know.
With CC3 there is an autosave. There's only one autosave file and its in a permanent position referenced by the "Open Autosave Drawing" menu item, so I don't think you can move it without breaking the menu item. Be assured, though that it's perfectly safe where it is. If you ever need to open that file save the opened drawing under a new name in one of your own folders immediately, because that's it - it is the autosave file.
That's just it, @Loopysue. I have to manually type the .ftw extension before I can be halfway sure I have forced it into the folder I use for all things Profantasy. Just doing Cmd-S isn't always enough to keep it there.
The image below should have a name, but it's Untitled. I typed TP c1, but I can't find it anywhere as a file in it's own right.
I made a folder to save my ft3 maps into under the FT35 folder. It doesn't have autosave.
I have a spreadsheet where I list the map by number, height, depth, random seed, circumference, roughness, percent sea, land size, and color used.
This is because I use these for my Traveller site, and if I want to go back and make a rotating globe, or re-export it.
At one point, FT3 picked up support for the Windows Restart Manager via the MFC framework that the program is based on. My entire involvement with setting up the feature was to tell the framework to handle everything, so I haven't looked too deeply at what the feature really does. My goal was to avoid losing work on the regular restarts due to Windows updates, and the framework feature was advertised to do that.
Examination of the feature shows that in addition to saving files when the system restarts (what I really wanted), the default value also requests autosaves at five minute intervals. These autosaved files go into the special Windows location FOLDERID_LocalAppData (which is either %LOCALAPPDATA% [ "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local" when expanded ] or "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data" if it's a legacy system). There is no user-accessible way to modify the autosave interval, or the save location, or to turn it off. I didn't do any testing on this feature because it was part of the framework that the rest of the software already uses, so I don't know how well it truly works (if at all) or how much of this information is actually correct.
I do agree that I should fix the extension thing on the file save dialog. The original code to handle that was for Windows 98, and I haven't looked at the default behavior recently to see if it's usable.
It is frustrating in the extreme that the link C:\Users\helen\Recent is the only "physical" file unless I force it to save in my nested Profantasy folder. I'm not used to that. I doubt saving it as an image file would help, would it @jslayton - would it?
The autosave feature will only save the ftw file to the path listed above (it was a bit of a surprise this morning to discover that it was trying to do autosaves at all). Exporting the ftw file as an image will lose the ability to make future changes to the world in FT3 unless you also save the ftw somewhere.
Generally, I would expect to see use of File>>Save As to establish where the file goes and the File>>Save to save any changes to the world from there on.
The files saved in Recent appear to be shortcuts to where the file resides on your system (it's also why they are all 1KB long instead of the real file size). If you right-click on the files in Recent and select Properties from the menu, Windows will show you where those files are physically located. For example, I saved a test file to my desktop and it went to %OneDrive%\Desktop\Untitled-1.ftw and an item on the Windows Recent File List was also created that shows in Explorer as a shortcut in the Recent folder named %USERPROFILE%\Recent\Untitled-1.ftw.
Putting information into the Windows Recent folder is managed by the FT3's framework and not something that's particularly under the control of ProFantasy. FT3 is much closer in its basic behaviors (e.g. save locations, restart manager use, recent file use, and so on) to a generic Windows 10 program than CC3 is because FT3 inherits the basic behaviors of all modern MFC programs.
Another problem I'm having @jslayton is I can't (a) make anything other than an Earth-like planet, (b) customise the gradient colours so I can have really deep oceans or really flat land without any mountains to speak of, and do that when I create a New World. The old version I had I could do this with no problems but this version, unless I've spent the bulk of my computer day being particularly thick [always a possibility] I can't work out how to override the Earthlike would settings.
The FT3+ world settings should be very similar to the FT3 world settings. The defaults should generate earth-like worlds, true, but you should be able to use Map>>World Settings to change those however you'd like.
The lighting and color system in FT3+ should also be very similar to how it was in FT3 (I don't think that I made any changes to this part for FT3). Changing the colors won't affect the underlying terrain in any version of FT, but reducing the lighting Intensity>Shadows setting can reduce the appearance of cragginess.
One thing to watch out for is that the FT3+ default editing resolution has become very large (8192) compared to FT3 (256), meaning that some things will tend to take longer than they used to.
Interesting. I didn't know there was an autosave feature either.
I have made a few hundred ft3+ worlds so far, all are different.
Have you changed the random seed before you click on 'apply to world' ? I've done that to myself before.