Fractal Terrains 3 Upgrade just dropped...

[guyanonymous]

It's $9.95 to upgrade for FT Pro 2 owners for the next week or so....

"Because you bought Fractal Terrains Pro world-building software from ProFantasy Software, you are entitled to an upgrade to the latest release - Fractal Terrains 3 - for only $9.95 / £7.50 - more than 60% off the retail price."

[ravells]

Yay, thanks guy, I'd missed that offer. Downloading FT3 now!

cheers

Ravs

[ravells]

Downloaded it and had a look at the new goodies. I guess the only two improvements which are of interest to me are the 16 bit png export and the better use of multi-cores (and possibly using a bitmap shader for the climate)...the upgrade looks a lot more like it was intended to bring FT Pro into line with CC3 products in terms of exporting to them.

[Ramah]

Yeah, I took a look at the new features on the update page and to be honest it seems more like a patched version than an actual update...

"Added normalize tool to manually fix problems with painting in earlier versions that could cause black areas to appear on the world."
"Many niggles and bugs fixed and export libraries updated."

They are listed as features. :S

[guyanonymous]

I'm just playing now - if it improves (actually fixes) exports and a few others stuff, I'll survive. At $9.99, I can live with it, though I was hoping for more improved algorithms etc. We'll see once I test it out. Regardless, it's got me interested again

Edit: I'm curious about the multicore and memory use. For the procedural stuff I've done so far, I can see it's using multiple cores, but it's not using any of them fully, rarely going above 30%. The rivers, for example (at 8090 setting) are taking quite a while to process - is this just the nature of it asking each core to do one thing and another core the next (and why they're all not at 100% as it goes 3x faster than currently)? And for memory - will this version use more than 4GB ram or is it still stuck with that limitation?

As a plus - no crashing yet!

[Mateus090985]

I had the FTPro instaled but I deleted yesterday. I have the FT3 upgrate for free (my copy of FTPro has a litle more than 1 month). Do I simple download the single arquive form my account or I do have to reinstall all things from FTPro and then install the "upgrade"? And I dont see manuals or Terraformers links for the FT3...

[guyanonymous]

It was a fresh install for me, by the looks of things - just asked for the new key.

And the rivers - despite taking a while - look far better than in the previous version. I used an old FT2 map, and the rivers I generated looked more realistic, and I didn't end up with strangely straight rivers all over the place. Yay!

[Mateus090985]

And the Terraformer? It's included on the single archive provided or is a separeted download?

From the FT3 page: "Terraformer is a free, unsupported add-on to Fractal Terrains created by user Bill Roach. It's available as a download for registered users."

[ravells]

Yes! The rivers do look much, much better!

[Ramah]

Yes! The rivers do look much, much better!

Well that is something I can finally get on board with. I'll wait for more views though before committing.