Wish List

[dobdriver]

G'Day wouanagaine,

I would firstly like to thank you for making 2 excellent programs and making them available to the wider community au gratis

Apart from them hogging all the resources and so cranky one sits there with baited breath and fingers, toes and anything else available to cross (this is all part of their charm really) they do their job admirably. It is no mean feat to export different formats!

The histogram (compressor) routine is superb, second to none in it's function of re-calculating from the original image. I was a little disappointed when I discovered it could only handle 17 x 17 large tile maps but thankfully mapper comes to the fore lifting that rate to 20 x 20. Is this size a limitation due to memory? This machine runs max memory for 32bit xp, but I am not really sure if it accesses the third gig. I might take one stick out and check if it accesses the third then or not. Task manager states TF is running between 1.7 and 1.9gig. I also run the machine lean on services - no virus, no firewall, no auto updates, no system restore, no messenger, no lots of things, it's here for me not for a pile of crap that others want one's machine bogged down with.

There is more than one way to skin a cat though and necessity breeds ingenuity and large maps have to be stretched before resizing. This seems to work ok but can only be checked ingame for correct heights, certainly not as quick as in terraformer. I'll probably limit the number of large maps anyway as their file size is getting towards excessively obese, a 74 x 80 map went from 3meg zipped for 8bit to 14meg un-compressable for 16bit.

Now for my wish list, is there any chance of an updated histogram routine? Say to 8000m equivilent. This would be very close to allowing eveywhere to be mapped without elevation compression and only a few places needing the high and low points reset to get under the ceiling. The lastest map I made I have compressed the elevation 239m to fit it between water level 251m and 6000m. It is hard to notice but I know. The peak Rakaposhi has one of the highest sheer walls known at a gnat's whisker under 6000m.

Thanks for your time and have a great new year.

Cheers
dobdriver

Now for

[wouanagaine]

Hi BobDriver,

It is likely there won't be any development on SC4TF anymore, because I lost the latest sources codes during moving from a lot of computers

The max size of a map is only limited to your RAM system

And the 6000m even if it is a totally out of nowhere limit, has been set up while developing SC4TF, because at that time noone can forsee a map needing to have a 0 elevation and more than 6000m on the same map,  and the SC4M format is relying of it ( more exactly one can produce a 6553,6m max elevation ), but 8000m can't be achieved with 16bit with a 10cm precision ( at least with the scheme I used to encode elevation )

[dobdriver]

G'Day wouanagaine,

Mmm, maybe it shouldn't be reset to higher even if you still had the source. At 6000m the white point is at 9%, resetting this to 0% and importing the map into sc4 the highest points do reach 6553.5m but unfortunately there is a consideralble amount of texture tearing on all but the closest zooms also there is more missing region view texture. This I have only checked with Teirusu's snow mod and no mods for the same result.

As an aside only mapper will import the map into sc4and hold the values over 6000m, terraformer resets all the values greater than the 6000m level back to 6000m and as a consequence everthing is flat topped at 6000m.

Thanks and cheers
dobdriver

[dobdriver]

G'Day Wouanagaine,

I have another small wish/want, but you may not be able to achieve this as it would also probably require the source code. Anyhow I'll push on with this as you may have found/recovered them?

I was a little wrong in my description of exporting to sc4m, it would appear to be more like a wrapper or container, yes?, as it carries not only the map file but also the config.bmp and an optional html page.

Can a utility be made that will open these sc4m files and export the png file out, without the need to import into one's game. Sort of like zip.

Mapper almost achieves this but requires the the map to be loaded from one's region, ie already imported into one's game. If one tries to load an sc4m file by clicking Load Region, one gets nothing.

Maybe a fix to allow exporting after clicking Create Region and loading an sc4m file, would/will be simple or maybe not.

Your thoughts on this would be appreciated by me. Thanks

Cheers
dobdriver