Fractal Mapper 9

[MarkOliva]

One of these days, Ed is bound to be sitting there twiddling his thumbs and not knowing what to do, and when those days come, I'm certain he's going to say, "It's time to make FM9." So I thought maybe we could help him by getting a thread topic going here that tells him what we'd like FM9 to do.

Threads like this are one of the things that forums do best, because they pocket the topic at a single location. This thread also has another potential benefit: Some of us may have things that we want FM8 to do that it actually does already. When that happens, we can give each other advice.


1. Improve Special Effects controls

The special effects are great but a bit underdeveloped. The sliders are OK, but there ought to be a place where a numerical value can be entered, so that one can set precisely the same degrees of scale, brightness, intensity, etc., for various objects on various layers. Getting the necessary precision is difficult to impossible when sliders are the only tool for making settings.

2. Improve Special Effects range

There are several areas where there simply is too little range behind the sliders on the special effects. Examples: Textures, when used with dark colors, often barely show up on paper, even when the highest intensity is used and printing is done with a very high quality color laser printer. When using fill effects on small objects, the scale can't be reduced sufficiently. This is a big problem when making raster symbols with FM8. When making a 5x5 foot object, we often have to open a 25x25 foot sheet just to be able to scale down the fill of the object properly. One then has to cut a lot of white space off afterward in the PNG export file.

3. Add a blend special effect

This even could be an additional option under blur. When two adjacent objects of different color are marked, this effect would create a smooth transitional blend between those colors.

4. Clean up the blur effect.

Blur often produces the cleanest result with Display Quality set to Highest/Special Effects Low Res. Unfortunately, thzis setting often is too low in quality for other objects in a map. When bounced up to Special Effects - Medium Res, the blurred objects often tend to begin pixelating. When moved farther up to Special Effects - High Res, foreign object effects with sharp, non-blurred edges often appear. (I'm sending Ed a sample of these phenomena.)

5. Add transparency to the ability of Fill styles.

PNG fills with transparent elements appear with the transparent parts black. Transparency should be supported in fills. One can work around this problem to a certain degree by creating new textures, but that solution is very limited. This is the only area where I think that Dundjinniâ„¢ comes out ahead of FM8.

6. Connecting symbols would be great.

Since switching a year and a half ago from CC3 to FM8, I've never been able to miss CC3 at all, but connecting symbols on raster level are one CC3 feature I miss dearly. They're fantastic for making roads, paths, rivers, even railroad tracks, etc. Of course, I realize that may be impossible within Fractal Mapper's program framework to do that. It might be a property taken from the FastCAD engine that CC3 uses. In that case, forget the suggestion. The CAD engine bogs CC3 down. We don't need that in FM9.

7. Fractalization needs more range.

I should be able to make long, relatively thin filled fractal polygons that serve as rivers, roads, etc., and add an elemental of fractalization to them, but even at the setting 1, their proportions become unbelievably distorted.

8. How about the ability to draw good, raster-filled, fractalized lines?

[Ed_NBOS]

One of these days, Ed is bound to be sitting there twiddling his thumbs and not knowing what to do, and when those days come, I'm certain he's going to say, "It's time to make FM9."

It's almost like you're sitting here in the office!

It'll probably be a year at least before work on FM9 starts, but I'm always open to ideas.

[MarkOliva]

Here are some more things that could be improved:

1. Give us a chance to save the color palettes that we make in the palette bar at the bottom of the screen. Having to remake a custom color bar is akin to an acute case of hemmorhoids. An XML file like EffectsStyle.xml would be a great improvement.

2. Save the Map/Display Quality settings when closing FM8, rather than constantly switching back to Fast with low resolution special effects. That setting worked rather well with vector maps but it's inadequate for raster maps, which is the only kind I make. The complete setback to Fast with low resolution special effects happens only when restarting FM8. When switching from one map to another or opening a new one, the quality setting remains unchanged, but the special effects resolution always reverts to low. This is a nuisance. On a substantial raster map, it can take a considerable amount of time to switch the special effects resolution back where one wants it from where FM8 wants it. That's even the case with 64-bit Windows and 8 GB memory.

[esmale]

Hi all,

Funny that Mark should post this topic, as I've been reviewing my FM wishlist. I really like the software, the map quality, and the gentle learning curve. But there are some showstoppers that really prevent me from using it exclusively:

1. Ortho mode - I need to draw a line whose endpoint is exactly 0 or 90 degrees relative to the point of origin. It's next to impossible to draw a long horizontal line with endpoints at the same "y" coordinate.

2. Coordinate entry - It would be great to input exact coordinates to ensure precision size. If I need a box of 14 x 12 with a bottom left corner at coordinates (x,y), I don't know how to do it.

3. Attach mode - If I'm making a map grid, I'd like to attach each gridline to the inside edge of the map border, but without an attach mode or the ability to input coordinates, I can't seem to accomplish this.

4. Colour palette - I second Mark's suggestion. It would be great if there was a way to save colour palettes as an external file that I could load up or attach to a specific map.

5. Layer settings - similar to an external colour palette, it would be great to save layer settings externally so that when I create a new template, I can save the layer names, order, and settings with it.

I apologise if any of these functions are already available - I fully submit to public flogging if I'm just being oblivious.

However, on the off-chance that I'm not being oblivious, I think these are great additions. I love how FM lets me generate great-looking maps fast, and I love the goblinAPI and IP integration even more. Now if I could just get some precision, I'd be ready to make the switch from CCx complete.

Cheers,

[MarkOliva]

Hi all,

I really like the software, the map quality, and the gentle learning curve. But there are some showstoppers that really prevent me from using it exclusively:

<SNIP>

I think these are great additions. I love how FM lets me generate great-looking maps fast, and I love the goblinAPI and IP integration even more. Now if I could just get some precision, I'd be ready to make the switch from CCx complete.

Great suggestions. Let me second all of them. It's also great to see you on board here. Another thing that Fractal Mapper needs is more very accomplished cartographers like you using it.

[esmale]

Hi all,

Here's another batch of wishlist items from my earlier FM8 notes. As before, if these functions are already available, please let me know and accept my apologies for cluttering the forum

1. Include a map preview in the File | Open dialogue box.

2. Provide visible guidelines when resizing lines, boxes, or polygons (i.e., show the line or edge as you're moving the mouse).

3. Related to that, show an outline of a symbol before placing it.

4. Constrain grid within a defined border as opposed to the entire map (e.g., when I apply a grid, displays on top of any border I've drawn around the map area).

5. Ability to input line width as a number or percentage of map scale.

6. Ability to paste objects between maps, maintaining scale (i.e., I want to open two FM sessions and paste objects from one to the other).

7. Ability to edit layer names via keyboard shortcut in the Layer Settings dialogue (e.g., use F2 instead of double-clicking). Admittedly, this is a nit-pick, but seems there should be an easier way to do this.

8. Prevent drop-down selections from changing when arrow keys are used. Try this: select a layer from the layer selection drop-down. Select an object with the mouse, then use the arrow keys to move that object. Note that the current layer is different from what you selected. Not a major issue, but you need to reselect the desired layer before placing another object. Just an extra step that I'd like to get rid of.

I realise that, individually, these are minor items. But from a UI standpoint, it would make map creation a bit faster and (for me at least) less error prone. Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

[dcf6]

Couple things:

1) When changing the size of map symbols there should be an option to lock the aspect ratio (perhaps even set on by default). The biggest spot for this is when you first place a map symbol. I'd really like to draw out the approximate size of the symbol without distorting it. Right now I place the symbol and then resize it as a two step process.

2) Ability to save and toggle through layer states (visible/selectable/secret) with fast keys. I frequently find myself making all but one layer unselectable to better edit complex maps. The ability to toggle back and forth with the press of a F# button, instead of going to the layer menu each time would be a great time saver.

3) Fractal line 2.0. In my experience, fractal lines don't scale as expected when looking at a map at different zooms. Also, you can only use colors with them, not fills. I'd like to see a new tool, that is essentially a fractal corridor. I'd have the midpoint of the corridor designated by the fractal line and allow the user to designate a thickness (in whatever units the map is in). An additional slider for this tool could be width roughness. At the far left the corridor is always equally wide. At the far right both sides of the corridor would deviate significantly from the midpoint so the width would change along the line. In my mind this would be a great river tool.

I'll add more as I continue to play with this program.

[MarkOliva]

Couple things:
1) When changing the size of map symbols there should be an option to lock the aspect ratio (perhaps even set on by default). The biggest spot for this is when you first place a map symbol. I'd really like to draw out the approximate size of the symbol without distorting it. Right now I place the symbol and then resize it as a two step process.

Do you know how the file default.xml works? If the symbol you are using is scaled properly, there should be no need to resize it at all, unless of course you're doing something unusual with it.

[dcf6]

I find that I don't always want to use symbols at the default scale. Once I rescale them they stay that way, which is great. However, being able to drag from the corner and have the relative width and height remain unchanged would be really nice. Currently, I just use ctrl-q and modify the size until I'm happy.

[dcf6]

1) I'm surprised that MarkOliva hasn't suggested this yet, but the ability to see the name (file name is fine) of a raster symbol or texture from within FM8 would be really helpful. This would be really helpful when placing symbols, because sometimes the difference between symbols can be subtle.

2) I'd also like to see some way of commenting an object. This would be similar to a secret text layer, except it isn't something that is ever visible on the map and it would be tied to an existing object. When you right click on an object, one of the options could be comment. This would pull up a pop-up window that lets you type in a bit of text. For example, I make a city map in my game. The PCs go to a tavern in the city and using inspiration pad pro I name it the "chicken and chicken" tavern. I want to remember this for the next game, so I right click on the building, select comment and type in 'chicken and chicken tavern: pcs got into a bar fight here.' This would ideally be stored in a comment database which could be read from within fractal mapper so you could see all the comments in a (maybe searchable) list. By double clicking on a comment in the database it would select the object that comment is tied to in the fractal map so I could find it again easily.