Town Raster Map & Super Zoom With FM8

[waldronate]

Would not this sort of thing work equally well in any sort of program that supports zooming? There seems to be severe aliasing of the assets at the maximum zoom level, which is consistent with a single-LOD implementation (or maybe some of the textures are maintaining a constant screen-space scale - it's hard to tell). ProFantasy's CC3 (and pretty much any CAD engine out there) will zoom nicely over the full range of numeric precision on the entities.

[Mark Oliva]

If my posting left the impression that I was contending that FM8 is the only program that can do this, then I apparently didn't write things clearly enough. I have no idea how many programs can do the same thing. I was responding instead to queries from people who didn't know too much about what FM8 can do and were interested, rather than trying to claim that FM8 alone can do such things.

Would not this sort of thing work equally well in any sort of program that supports zooming?

No. A lot of programs support zooming, but the issue is how the program deals with the object upon which one is zooming. To use a ridiculous but obvious example, I can load a JPG in Microsoft Paint and zoom in on it, but sooner or later, it will pixilate beyond recognition. FM8 - and probably some other programs too - insert a reference to the actual object, so, regardless of the degree of the zoom, you always have the resolution of the original object.

ProFantasy's CC3 (and pretty much any CAD engine out there) will zoom nicely over the full range of numeric precision on the entities.

Only reluctantly do I make a CC3 comparison. I quit using CC3 more than a year ago (after a decade or more with CC2 Pro). I never used it with the current patches, so some of my remarks may be out of date. In other cases, I may be recalling things incorrectly. If so, I hope someone will correct my remarks quickly.

When I used CC3 (if my memory serves me right), it usually had three versions of each raster object (i.e. symbol), in high, medium and low resolution. Based upon the scale of the map, CC3 picked its own preferred version among the three. When one zoomed in upon small objects on large maps, the small objects pixilated unacceptably, at least by my standards.

However, I also don't want to leave the false impression that we dropped CC3 because of this issue. CC3 is unable to embed raster objects in maps, and that inability makes CC3 100% incompatible with our products. That's the one and only reason that we dropped CC3 and went to FM8. We want our users to be able to take our maps in their native format and edit or modify them to their heart's content. That's possible with CC3 vector maps but not with CC3 raster maps.

I can't comment on other mapping programs like Map Maker and Map Tool. I've never used them.

I do use Dundjinni. Theoretically, Dundjinni could do the same thing as FM8. Practically speaking, it's impossible. Dundjinni works with a single, fixed scale of 40 Pixels = 1 foot. A PNG object portraying a large building at that scale can have a size of 30 MB and more, which quickly leads to memory crashes when trying to do really large scale maps. One workaround is to make these objects at a smaller scale and then blow them up within Dundjinni. However, when one zooms close in on such objects, they again pixilate unacceptably.

Unfortunately, Dundjinni hasn't been updated since 2004 (Version 1.07), and Dundjinni Enterprises has said that further development of the announced Version 2.0 is on indefinite hold. One had hoped that Version 2.0 would allow for variable scaling, but that appears to be hope on hold now.

What differentiates FM8 from CC3 and Dundjinni in the particular respect being discussed is that FM8 allows a separate scale definition for each object, and when FM8 places the object in a map, the object retains its own individually desiigned resolution, making somewhat incredible zooms without quality loss or pixilation possible.

Once again: If my remarks about CC3 are incorrect or obsolete, someone should correct me.