I’m continuing my development and things are shaping up nicely. Right now I’m focussed on cleaning up the code. With the sphere stuff mostly working, I’m concentrating on all the other basic features that the program should have and fixing bugs.
So it is actually starting to look like a real application. And this evening I put it through its paces. I slapped together support for printing, and I’m finding out what a monster I’ve written.
Here’s the deal: The program will generate a world map that is rather rough. These can be spit out very quickly. When you find a map you like, you should then start manipulating it. One of the basic manipulations is to make it less-rough. I call it “increasing granularity”. It adds more details, allowing you to zoom in more and still have a nice view. Since a printed copy is more detailed than the screen, it makes a better image for printing. But it also quadruples the size of the map.
So I found a world I liked, increased the granularity several times and then printed it out. This brought my printer to its knees. I have a nice laser printer, and it took 14 minutes to spit out the final map. One page. Simple maps come out easily, but this was a 12mb file.
I wish I could say that it looks gorgeous, but it doesn’t yet. It looks impressive. The problem is that I haven’t been doing as much with colour as I would like. The water is nice and vibrantly blue, but the land is in greyscale. So it looks rather bleak.
Still, I like looking at it and seeing all the coastal features that have shown up. There are a few interesting archipelagos that catch the eye.
But as much as I would like to get more colours in this, I want to finish cleaning up. Once I have done that, I’m going to put it online so that it can be downloaded by people who are interested in this. (Or, as I like to refer to them, “my testers”.)