I've been doing some unglamorous tinkering with the app, mostly to do with trying to make the regional relief maps prettier. In addition to bug-squashing, I've added the following refinements:
- The roughness levels of most terrain have been raised, sometimes fairly drastically. I think the rougher terrain simply looks better, as the texture of the ground appears much more interesting (I'm not sure how realistic it actually is, but still, I like the look). But of course smoother terrain still occurs as well, as we want variety above all.
- I've made seabeds smoother, which makes for a much nicer appearance with fewer undesirable artefacts. (Deep sea trenches look especially ominous now.)
- Polar coastlines had a tendency to be very straight and dull-looking, for some reason which I've been unable to track down. I've bodged the issue by simply creating new routines to make them more fragmented and interesting. (This is quite apart from the much more crinkly fjords, of course, which appear where mountain ranges meet the coasts in colder areas.)
- In areas where land is removed by applying a fractal, there's now a (small) chance of small islands being scattered over the area. The islands are made by building short mountain ranges, or isolated peaks (like extinct volcanos), in the water. This makes for a nice Aegean sort of appearance, with archipelagos of small mountainous islands, which adds more variety to the global maps.
- Previously, the transition between arctic and subarctic areas was drawn gradually in the relief maps, with a smooth shift from tundra colours to white. I've added two new ways of showing this transition - one with a sharp change from tundra colours to white, and one with a speckled intermediate zone. The sharp change is the new default, as I think it looks best, but the others can be chosen in the visual settings menu.
Here are some sample images.
Rougher terrain:
Seabeds:
Polar coastlines:
Small, mountainous islands:
Snow transition zones:
More tinkering and checking to come, then I will hopefully be in a position to release something.
