MarkOliva

10/13/2009

1638

As the first freezing temperatures approach here in Northern Bavaria, our project group has given up on extending the summer vacation farther and is back at work producing cartographic and RPG material. Our first new free and open release is a new Version 2.0 of the Vintyri (TM) Textures & Fills. This is a substantially improved follow-up to the sets of overland and settlement raster fills for FM8 which were offered here first as a Dungeons Daring (TM) and later as an expanded Vintyri set of fills. Version 2.0 replaces the Dungeons Daring fills and the Vintyri Fills & Textures in Versions 1.0 and 1.1. It extends the set with a few new fills, but above all, it presents the original fills in much improved quality. The seed graphics for the original fills were digital photos made by our group and public domain photos from governmental agencies. After a lot of manipulation with GIMP, we had turned them into serviceable albeit somewhat less than perfect fills. Recently, Carl Nielsen of our project group redid almost all of the fills, this time running the GIMP-manipulated graphics through a program that only recently came to our attention called ImageSynth (R), which makes excellent tiles for mapping. This new version eliminates the tiling patterns and the problematical redundancy that were in the earlier fills, so that they now will spread smoothly across your FM8 maps. If you don't know what I'm talking about in the last sentence, look at the rather corny sample map above. It shows the same island with a brushy elevation in the middle twice. The "before" version on the left was made with the old fills. The "after" version on the right was made with the new fills. This new and considerably improved release includes 80 fills in the overland category, 14 in the settlements category and 11 in the structures category. In the main overland group there are, among many other things, fills for grasslands, mountains, deserts, prairies, swamps, tundra, snow-covered terrain, waterways, etc. A 20-page PDF - also free and open - accompanies the new release. It includes color catalogs for all of the new fills. The remaining material is identical to that in the PDF for Versions 1.0 and 1.1. The PDF also includes installation instructions. You can download the fills and the PDF free at:

www.vintyri.com

Please note: Installing the new version will not delete the old fills. If you want only the new fills, erase the old folders Vintyri Overland, Vintyri Settlements and Vintyri Structures first. If you want both sets, we suggest that you rename these three older folders before installing the new fills. That will help you avoid a lot of confusion later,

The link below will download only the sample map above. The fill sets exceed the NBOS file size limits and cannot uploaded here.

Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
www.vintyri.com
info@vintyri.com