Fractal Terrains tools a little wacky

[Girltron]

Maybe this is my computer, not the program. But I'm finding the FT Pro tools to be rather unpredictable. Here's my issue:

I found a mysterious series of small spots of very high temperature right in the middle of a section of tundra. I suspect they exist right across that latitude, but I haven't checked yet. So I wanted to manually "paint" more appropriate temperatures for those spots.

I chose the Paint Lower>temperature tool and dialed in an appropriate brush size and value. Instead of lowering the temperature of the area, it raised it. Stumped, I changed it to "raise" and tried again. It raised the temperature even more.

I got really mad and closed out FT, reopened it, and tried the tools again. They worked normally for a bit, then reverted back to raising the temperature no matter what I did. Another restart, and a similar thing happened but sometimes the tool would just do nothing as opposed to raising or lowering the temperature.

Now I've got a crazy boggled section of mountainous region with spots of really low temp and spots of outrageously high temp because of the tools acting funny and making the problem worse. I can't revert back to an older save because I have no idea when the spots arrived, they may have been part of the very first draft of the world.

Has anyone else seen this?

To fix it, I'd really prefer to select a region and then manually dial in a particular temperature to fill the region. That's all I want. Can't it be done?

[Greason Wolfe]

Can't say I've ever had that problem. I suppose in a worst case scenario, you could always go with a global set on temperature at the lowest value and then build up the temperatures as needed. Waldonrate might be along later and have some better advice or a solution for you though.

GW

[Bohunk]

I have same issues near what I call the end of the map. For whatever reason when I have my grid on, and the button for adaptive grid on, I lose some of my grid at a certain point on the map; this, I'm guessing is the edge or end of the map. It’s hard to explain but I guess that this is the side of the map that FT is having issues with. I spin the side globe around until the end of the map is moved to the edge (on a flat projection) and I try to make sure that no land crosses this area by repositioning the North Pole.

I have tried to rectify this prob to no avail. Hopefully someone can fill us in.

[guyanonymous]

Same here...odd things along that single vertical edge.

[Girltron]

Wow, I'm NOT crazy.

Resetting the global temperature might not be bad, except blah what a pain. Might be worth it, though. I thought if I just jacked up the elevation in that spot it'd apply temp settings automatically and then I could reduce the elevation again; that didn't really work out either.

Can I ask a question not highly related?

How can I place latitude/longitude lines that wrap around the globe correctly? I really could use this while painting my temperatures. I'd like them to export with the map, too. The grid settings confuse me.

I've only been using FT for a few days, which is why I'm asking dumb questions.

Anyway I'm curious. I was painting deserts at the time; FT doesn't seem to put deserts anywhere automatically, so I had to adjust rainfall amounts in different areas. Why is this? I think I'm right about where the deserts should be, but they didn't show up anywhere at all in the random generation stage of the process.

[waldronate]

Make sure that you have the current FT update from the ProFantasy website. It should be something like 2.3.0.8 or so. There were some tool issues in earlier versions.

How are the gridlines not wrapping around the globe properly?

The FT climate model is primitive at best. It does not take into account global air or water circulation. These are the two most important factors in placing deserts and so FT doesn't generate deserts with the default settings.

The painting tools in FT (especially early 2.x versions) are a bit twitchy. For temperature and rainfall I recommend selecting the area of interest, feathering the selection, and then doing global raise and lower operations. Note that this trick only works well if you have sufficient editing resolution to get at least several pixels across your area of interest.

The FT code base is nearing its 10th birthday and the core code (much of it from Wilbur) is approaching 18. I've learned a lot since then but can't kill off the old product or levy unreasonable hardware burdens on existing customers for product updtes.

[Bohunk]

Girltron,

You can take adaptive grid resolution check mark off and it should give you grid lines that look good in FT. You can't, however, save as png with grid lines on (at least not on my comp), I get a crash. So you have to export the grid with to cc3 hide all layers except grid and then save as png.

[waldronate]

Contact ProFantasy tech support about the crashing grid problem. I understand there is a fix available for it.

[Girltron]

Thanks to both for your input, I will try as you suggest. I think this is less program issue and more user error, as I'm so new to FT. I did upgrade FT last weekend to the latest and greatest, and I think I have all the patches. I'll check.

It strikes me that your select-a-region approach would be a lot less time consuming and result in a more uniform result. They're averages anyway; why should I want to have bitty little regional differences? That's basically the kind of solution I was hoping for, I just hadn't tried it yet because I didn't know if the "global" tools would apply only to a selection. It was 5 am, after all.

I'll do that, I'm sure it'll work fine. Maybe I'll start from a base min temp and work up globally, given that the suggestions are so crude. I like that anyway. Always do it the fiddly way, that seems to be my motto.

[Girltron]

Oh-it's not that the gridlines don't work for me; it's that I don't know how to use them properly. I thought I'd have access to a full manual when I downloaded the upgrade, but I didn't see it anywhere. I may have deleted it out of my "downloads" folder without thinking. I'll contact Profantasy about that question eventually.