Sunday, January 6, 2013

Dwarfpunch Mapper: 0.6 is out!

Download available on Bitbucket (it's only 0.6, so it's still not perfect, but working way better)

  It's a small update, but it brings about three important changes:


  • The most obvious change is that the progress bar has been removed from the main window. Now it has a separate window that both makes it so the user interface doesn't "freeze up" anymore. It also gives users feedback about where the program is in the process, which will help with bug hunting in the future when crashes occur outside the developer environment.

  • There's a new forest background layer. It now tiles a lot less obviously. It's really swollen up in size, but that should be fixed soon. We're going to replace it with a smaller tile, with some changes so it's repeating more, but also less obvious about it. Future versions will also let users change the textures without have to replace the files completely and control how the tiling works.

  • Rainfall is now working a bit better. It's still not exactly perfect, but changing it made it not add weird bright spots that weren't attractive.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Dwarfpunch Mapper is now at 0.5.5!

Download available on Bitbucket (it's only 0.5.5, so it's not exactly perfect, just working)

   Dwarfpunch Mapper has been progressing nicely. Thanks to the documentation on his process kabookie was able to give me, I had a functional version up and running within a few days. However, it was actually quite lacking in the interface department. It was purely functional for a very basic version of the program. Now we're looking at this:



   Now users can toggle various layers on and off as we add more to the program. Some people on /r/dwarffortress were asking about glacier/tundra areas being visible as ice. 



   Since Dwarf Fortress has this "biome" output option, it's actually really easy to do something like this in a future version. Of course, it's going to be completely optional so you don't need to have ice and deserts if you don't want to.

  This version also started filling in the settings dialog, with some options for color added to the previously lonely image scale setting. This was originally meant to help testing, but it actually can make some kind of interesting fantasy landscapes possible:


   The top priorities now are getting the output more refined (matching the original Photoshop script more), replacing more of the hard-coded values with settings, and finding out what other layers can be added to the map, in that order.