New Blog!

We’re getting close to Beta 6 and moving toward our release candidate! We’re opening this blog in order to keep everyone better updated on what we are up to!

Look forward to posts about the changes you’ll see with Beta 6 as well as information about what we’re planning for future versions and other projects and news!

What we are up to

Right now we are prioritizing finishing and cleaning up the basic tools and functionality that applies to all map types, and the overland tools. We already completed many changes since we released Beta 5.

Shorelines

Shorelines were one of the top aspects that kept us from calling Beta 5 a release candidate when it comes to the overland tools: we weren’t happy with the speed, look and the options. So with Beta 6 you’ll see the following changes:

  • Shorelines are now anti-aliased (previous versions did not implement anti-aliasing for them).
  • Shorelines have now additional styles and options.
  • Parallel generation and rasterazing. The work to create the shorelines now happen in parallel so you can continue editing the map while the shorelines are created and when they are finished the map preview updates to include them.
  • Performance improvements: we re-wrote a lot of the code and we are now making full use of multi-core processors. For single core processors the generation time is now many times faster, particularly for complex maps. If your CPU has multiple cores you’ll notice the time it takes to generates shorelines is even lower and almost divides by the number of cores.
Farangor Section
One of the new shoreline styles with anti-aliasing.

River and Landmass Interaction

With Beta 6 rivers will now also automatically interact with the outline of landmasses the way they interact with bodies of water, to create one seamless layer.
While doing this we also corrected issues with the interaction between rivers and bodies of water which created visual artifacts with some settings.

River interaction
Simple map showing landmass and river interaction

Labels

  • Added more in-place editing functionality for labels: with Beta 6 you’ll be able to select, copy and paste text while editing labels.
  • Added options for outer stroke for labels
  • Improved text on path. Text on path label algorithm now better distributes text along path. We also improved the performance of path labels considerably.
Text Stroke
Text Stroke

Many more changes are coming with Beta 6. We’ll show you more of the upcoming functionality with the next blog!

– Alejandro @Three Minds Software

1 Comment


  1. Great Progress. I am excited to get my hands on it.

    Reply

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