Nortantis Updates (Version 3.0)
It’s been five months since the last time I pushed out a Nortantis update, and I’m updating the major version to 3 since there are some significant changes. Also, if you have the 3.0 beta version, you will need to upgrade to version 3.01 for all the new features in the post to work correctly.
Art Packs
Art packs are an easy way to expand the available art assets available in Nortantis. You can try one now with this bonus art pack I created with the help of Bing Image Creator. To install it, in Nortantis, go to Tools -> Art Packs -> Add Art Pack, and select the zip file. Here’s a sample of the art in it:
Before art packs, you could add your own art to your map using a Custom Image Folder (available in the Edit menu), but art packs are easier to share because Nortantis installs them from zip files, and installed art packs become available to all of maps instead of just the ones with a configured Custom Images Folder.
Creating an art pack deserves a post of its own, so I’ll be writing one soon, but for now I’ll say that the required folder structure and image format for art packs is the same as that of Custom Images Folders, so you can read the documentation in Nortantis for those to get an admittedly terse, technical introduction to it.
The Tools -> Art Packs menu has two other options. Open Art Packs Folder opens the folder art packs are installed in, so you can manage/delete them. The last option, Highlight Icons in Art Packs, allows you to figure out which art pack icons in your map came from.
The types of resources art packs can include:
Background textures
Borders
Any type of icon that can be drawn in the Icons tool: cities, decorations, hills, mountains, sand dunes, and trees.
To allow the Background tab to use background textures from art packs, when the Background option is “Generate from texture,” you’ll see an option to select a “Texture source” of Assets or File. The File option is just a file selector like Nortantis previously had, but the Assets option shows a dropdown to select a background texture from an art pack (or the Custom Images Folder if the map has one; if it does, it will appears as an art pack named ‘custom’). The art pack name appears in square brackets after the image name. The ‘nortantis’ art pack is the assets that come installed with Nortantis.
Similarly, the “Border type” in the Borders tab now tells you which art pack borders are from.
In the Icons tab, I added a new option to select which art pack to draw from:
And when creating new maps, I added a field to select an art pack (this is only for initially creating the map; once created, you can add/replace art from any art pack).
So, what happens if you use an art pack, then later remove or rename that art pack, or try to open the map on a computer that doesn’t have the art pack installed? The good news is you don’t have to worry about your map being permanently lost because Nortantis can’t find the images you used to create it. Instead, Nortantis will try to be smart about swapping out the icons for others that are installed. If this happens, you’ll get a warning popup that lists every icon swapped out and what replaced it.
Political Region Boundaries
In the Background tab (in the left panel), I added more options for drawing political region boundaries:
Previously, political region boundary lines were always solid and used the coastline color. Now, you can select between solid lines, two versions of dashed lines, dotted lines, or you can disable drawing region boundaries entirely while still allowing regions to have individual colors. You can also change the color and width of political boundaries. The options in the “Land and Water” tool have been updated accordingly, and I similarly added the ability to change coastline width.
Border Color
Previously, the background color used for transparent pixels in border images was always the ocean color. Now, I’ve added an option in in the Border tab (in the left panel), to select a different background color for your border.
Coloring Individual Text
In the Text tool, I added a new checkbox to allow using multiple different text colors in a map.
When unchecked, a color picker appears. If you have enabled “Bold background for region and title names” in the Fonts tab, then the Text tool shows a second color picker for changing the bold background color of region and title names.
Other Changes
In the Effects tab, ocean shading is now a separate option from ocean waves. This allows having both shading and waves. But be warned, using both will make your map draw slower, which can make the editor less responsive. It might be smart to shut one or both of them off until you’re done making edits.
The installed assets now include scale bars, under Decorations.
The compasses in the decorations are now drawn a little smaller by default (except for “compass 5”), because I thought their default sizes were too big. If you have a map with one of those compasses, it will shrink a little automatically when opened in the new version, so check to make sure it still looks right for your map.
The windows installer is now digitally signed, thanks to free code signing for open-source projects from SignPath.io. This means the popup asking for permission to install will no longer say the installer is from an unknown publisher. And since SignPath requires using a trusted build system (GitHub actions) to do the signing, this also adds an extra layer of safety to the Windows installer since the program it installs is guaranteed to be compiled from the code checked into the repository.
Thanks to some help from Carsten Burgard which I built off of, the assets that come with Nortantis are now packed into the jar file when building the project as a jar file. Those of you using an installer probably won’t notice any difference, but for anyone building the jar file from source, this means it no longer has to run in the same folder as the assets folder.
Undo/Redo no longer switch to the editing tool that made the change.
Editing brushes now have a 2x brush size.
Improved river line quality.
When a new version is released, Nortantis will show a popup at startup to let you know.
Lots of bug fixes.
