with significant help from waldronate i've been developing a new software for mapping.

atm it's buggered because of the !@(#*&$^ win32 sdk (no clue how to make more than one auxiliary dialog)

so i figured that itm i'd share what i've got, which is only the height field gen function so far.. not much

next step is to add a panel for editing oceans.. once i have an appropriate place to enter a water level coefficient, it can do the same thing with green and blue instead of gray.. about 2 minutes of editing.

http://www.xoxos.net/temp/map4.zip

preview mode: (the default mode)
current functions are all on the first panel, globe > height field. open that up, then (or before) wiggle your pointer on the gui. shift confines to orthogonal editing, right click 'spins' (well.. it's not really spinning.. there's side-to-side/longitudinal movement, then latitude and 'rotate'/right click are the two other axes..

...it's not ideal. i'd like to have confined the rotation to 'down' in the center of the image, but that's counterintuitive to the 3d axis system (and not as easy to code..)


...it's fairly nifty in preview mode, but if you turn it off, it will take about a minute to render.. (internally 4096x204 - you can't see this because i haven't added the bmp export functions to this build yet...

i enjoy procedural programming, and while the height field will have manual editing, and various generative functions.. atm it's more because i like to code this than a really useful thing.. my coding aesthetic is ~antithesis to the commercial paradigm so there's no way it will ever have the bells and whistles of the other apps out there. but it should be ideal if you're about making stuff up quickly.

..if you're a win32 sdk genius, pls see other thread in software forum so i can add my bloody 2nd panel and move forward