Quick update

Hello everyone. This is just a brief post to update the project. I've been doing lots of unglamorous bug-squashing. At long last, the lakes are *mostly* behaving themselves. Rivers are too, usually, as long as you don't look too closely. A lot of issues remain, but it's all looking a little smoother than it was, and I need to move on while I still retain some will to live. I've also done more work on the coastlines, which are never good enough, but they're looking generally pretty decent. Surprisingly, I found that my landfill method was now actually counter-productive - the coasts looked better without it. So I've removed that, presumably getting some speed increase into the bargain.

I've done some rejigging of the colours used to draw the relief maps, and I'm quite pleased with the results:

I said previously that I intended to rewrite it so that when the regional map is scrolled, it generates only the tiles on the leading edge, shifting the rest of the map rather than regenerating the whole thing each step. After several days of working on this, I've found that it is indeed faster, but it's impossible to guarantee that those tiles are exactly correct. Regenerating the entire map after it has been scrolled in this way always results in changes in those leading edge tiles, no matter what I do to get around this. The absolute bedrock first principle of the regional map is that any given cell from the global map should always yield exactly the same tile on the regional map, no matter what, so I've very reluctantly had to give up on this and keep the system of regenerating the whole regional map every time it's scrolled.

(An unexpected byproduct of this was that I discovered the little algorithm that generates the marbling effect I've added to the maps - most apparent in the sea. It doesn't mean anything but adds some nice visual interest, I think, so the work wasn't entirely wasted.)

There are still a couple of more glaring bugs to get rid of, and then it's time to think about larger global maps and larger regional maps too. Both of these will probably also require a serious rethink of the UI, which at the moment doesn't really exist.