Quote Originally Posted by galrionmartel View Post
Well that sounds ominous. Is there a program that would give me a better foundation?
Not that I have found, no. Then again, I wrote FT, so I'm a bit more aware of what it can't do than most people. As long as you stick moderately close to the intended purpose of FT, it does a reasonable job and it accretes more features over time. Admittedly, some of the accretion results in features that are a bit peculiar. Some of the limits are simply because I didn't know in 1998 what I know in 2013.

The ProFantasy forum is another excellent place to ask questions about FT.

As an example of bizarre features, FT has both a "pre-scale offset" and an "offset" adjustment layer. The pre-scale layer is defined in an odd space that's not really helpful to users, while the offset feature is defiend in the user's preferred editing units. The pre-scale layer gives better results, but didn't make its debut until later versions of FT. Many of the tools in FT don't work with the pre-scale layer, which is a shame. Again, it's one of those things where you learn new things and try to retrofit to the old.

As examples of limits, FT is a purely software-based renderer that uses the elderly Windows GDI system for drawing. That means no antialiased lines, and very little in the way of hardware acceleration. FT didn't even become multithreaded until fairly recently. FT uses a brute-force approach to its computations, which slows things down quite a lot. It also uses several uncompressed, uniform-sized 32-bit floating-point surfaces for its workspaces, meaning that it's a memory hog. Those workspaces aren't defined very efficiently, either. The files store those surfaces in an uncompressed manner; people have been amazed when a 100+MB FT file compresses down to a few hundred KB. FT is also a 32-bit program, meaning that it hits memory limits far sooner than many people would like (there is an experimental and unreleased 64-bit version that bumps up the limits substantially).

If I were starting development today, I would do a lot of things differently. The world is very much unlike it was when the Pentium II 450MHz machine with 128MB and running Windows 98 was king.