ProFantasy Community Forum

FT landmasses disappearing

HamsterHamster
in Community Support
Hi, folks. First post from me.

I recently installed FT (c. 2004?) on my new laptop running XP. Often when I do something that causes the map to redraw (like scanning or zooming), all the landmasses disappear. Frequently when I pan (sticky hand on the small globe to pan), the map will move to the new point briefly and then either draw some other location entirely or the landmasses will disappear again. I'm seeing an awful lot of ocean! Except that it's not ocean -- when I mouse over the map, the info on the left indicates various kind of land (tundra, forest, what have you) but the map is all ocean blue. It's also speckled.

Any help much appreciated!
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Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    Have you installed the latest Patch (v2.3). Check Help->About in FT if you are unsure. If you don't have 2.3, get it from your Registration Page
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  • HamsterHamster
    I just registered FT and checked my registration page. There was a link to a version 1.6 but nothing about 2.3. Is that an FT-Pro patch? I've only got FT.

    The good news is that version 1.6 runs a little better than whatever I had before - less jumping to unexpected coordinates, less blank water, less hatching on the maps. It's still doing all those things, but it's definitely an improvement!
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  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    Yes. 2.3 is for the Pro version. I haven't used anything but the Pro version myself unfortunately.
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  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    FT 1.x has known issues with regards to the speed of the hardware. It worked well on P2/450 machines, but modern machines tend to be too fast for it. FT Pro (2.x) is better at handling modern hardware. If you can afford to upgrade I would recommend it. FT Pro has many useful features in addition to the basic ones provided in FT.
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  • HamsterHamster
    I downloaded the demo to try it out. No more map problems and things do seem to redraw a bit faster. Navigating by the mini-globe is definitely much faster. Now if I can just figure out how to get realistic lakes and rivers...

    Thanks for the help, both of you. :)
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  • JetdriverJetdriver
    Lakes I can't help you with but the rivers were mentioned in another post. When you choose to draw the rivers you can choose the length. Having the setting at it's longest produces a spider web of rivers, if you reduce it you will see the change on the map after the alteration (ie before you accept it with the ok) I found having the slider at around a 70% mark (not sure of the actual setting) produced rivers of a decent length and reduced the spiderweb effect substatially.

    Cheers
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  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    edited April 2008
    Check out http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/index.html for some recommendations on doing some world editing with FT. Also, what you see on the screen in FT isn't exactly what comes out in CCx. The onscreen renderer for FT uses an internal "importance" parameter to avoid drawing tiny river segments on the images but the CCx exporter sends out all of the rivers. Limiting the scope of rivers using the river length slider during generation will prevent things from getting too out of hand.
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  • 6 days later
  • HamsterHamster
    Thanks all. I'd read the posts about rivers that you alluded to, Jetdriver - thanks for the tip. Jslayton, that's a great tutorial!
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