I am always in favor of folks having the latest version of the software. Not just because it's revenue for me but because the features that I add usually give better results than in prior versions. http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/ was done with the current V2.3 FT Pro version and shows many of those tools.Originally Posted by Sigurd
When I got Fractal Terrains I was absolutely floored.
I can't live with the silly string curls on the surface of the land. I can't hide em and I can't blend em without losing the quality of the render. I just want cleaner land renders but I want to be able to work from a globe.
The only options on the program for me are Rigid Fractal and Brownian motion. I don't like the brownian motion either.
My question is...
Is the latest Fractal Terrains the smart choice?
FT was always intended to be more of a world-level and region-level editor rather than a village-level tool. It does what it was intended for pretty well, and fails hopelessly at things that it wasn't intended for.
There were some serious limitations in the V1.X versions of the program. Version 2.X were much better. A serious limitation of the V1 product line was the fractal basis function (more precisely the poor implementation of the basis functions caused by bad choices during speed optimization). They tended to leave all manner of strange artifacts on the surface. Version 2.X has the analogous shaders straight out the Wilbur software, which suffer much less from this effect. However, there is a practical limit in how far you can go down in the FT zooms because I capped the number of octaves for performance reasons.
FT3 will be out after it gets written. PF had hoped to get one out before the summer convention season, but I have used my vacation from my day job on silly things like getting married so progress has been slow. I can't say for sure when delivery might be. I cannot speak for ProFantasy on pricing.
When I last used Fractal World Explorer a couple of months ago, it let you specify a fixed resolution for the world and that was what you got. You could output a whole globe image, but you were always limited by the original resolution that you picked so zooming in just made the pixels bigger. FWE is a useful tool for generating images of worlds using fBm but it didn't do much for me otherwise. I will admit bias in favor of FT, but that's because FT is my child.
There aren't a lot of choices out there for whole-world to mid-scale editing. Various tools do bits and pieces of the process, but I haven't yet found a good overall program that implements the basics passably well (terrain, climate, peoples, history, etc.)
I know way more than I did back in 1998 when I started FT. From time to time I toy with the idea of starting fresh rather than perpetually patching FT. I'm reworking the code base now to get ready for FT3, but it's like trying to turn a Yugo into a monster truck while going down the highway at 80 mph. Too many decisions made 10 years ago and the need to be compatible with prior versions are conflicting with some of the desires for modern features (for example, how do you handle multi-gigabyte paged databases on a 32-bit machine with code that assumes contiguous memory spans).
Joe Slayton
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