New to Digital Cartography? Software General Information

[dormouse]

BUT it definitely does need a reasonable graphics card, the sort you would use for games. Tho nowadays thats not so much of an issue as when I first released it. Anything with 32Mb or more on board graphics card RAM like the old nVidia AGP ones through to the ultra modern PCIe2 types. Theres a free test utility you can download from my site to test the graphics system speed and tell you what you have running and where this may or may not be a problem for the app.

Hmmm, I replied to Icosahedron before seeing this

I just tried the test utility and it says my system is too slow
That explains the problems I had, though I would have expected my graphics card to be good enough though it was chosen for resolution not gaming.
Radeon 3650 with 768MB RAM, now that I have checked. But I do run lots of progs and 2 monitors (one 24" and one 22").

It is raster - at least I would say it is. For certain, it does not take in any vector formats like SVG or has any line or shape drawing abilities. Everything is done using raster bitmaps.
...

So since the app has no base bitmap and everything is on stretchy rubber then there are no virtually no borders and no limits to the extents or zoom factor. The res of all icons shown is still limited to that of the images making up the icons tho so you might need a world, some regions, a town and a floor plan maps all done to zoom between outer space and crack in the floor. The apps job is to take care of the scaling of the images and blending between them to pick the right one at the right time and deliver the seamless experience.

Yes, this is what I thought. The zoom feature is very good (at least on systems that can handle it), but will be limited by the detail available on the image whereas vectors just have descriptions that zoom at all scales precisely - but there's a limit to the complexity of an image that this can be done with.

It sounds like a very good way of doing what it does, though I don't see it as being like DF - or indeed any of the other progs out there. I'm not convinced that FM8 or CC3 are good for fast, good battlemaps - though I'll investigate more - I think that DF and DJ can do this - and I suspect that VD does too. And VD adds the option to zoom regionally etc which would be good in lots of situations, especially if using it like a VTT.

[Redrobes]

I just tried the test utility and it says my system is too slow
That explains the problems I had, though I would have expected my graphics card to be good enough though it was chosen for resolution not gaming.
Radeon 3650 with 768MB RAM, now that I have checked. But I do run lots of progs and 2 monitors (one 24" and one 22").

That card would be waaaay in excess of the minimum standard required for the app. When you ran the test app did it say anything other than it was too slow. Did it say that it was running using the software renderer or it was not in true color or some other message like that ?

I run two monitors too and this is what I get with a less powerful card than you have.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKYU2gcsaoQ

Well, let me know if you want me to investigate.