Nortantis Updates (Version 3.1)

I’ve been working on a lot of new features in this version, so let's jump into it.

Roads

Maps can now have roads! This was a decent-sized project that I've been wanting to do for a long time.

You can enable/disable roads and adjust map-wide road settings in the left panel, under Effects. and you can draw/erase roads in the Land and Water tool using the Roads brush.

New random maps always have roads by default, but you can disable them by unchecking Effects -> Draw roads.

New Options for Concentric Waves

I've added new options for concentric waves and combined those with the option for fading concentric waves. So now, in the Effects tab, concentric waves have three “style” options:

• Fade outer waves - Waves become more transparent as they draw farther from the coast. Same as the fading option from before.

• Jitter - Add random variation to the control points used to draw the waves to make them jitter, making them look more hand-drawn.

• Broken lines - Add random breaks in the wave lines.

Here’s a screenshot of 4 concentric waves with all the options checked:

As an added bonus, concentric waves now draw much faster, which means maps that use them open several seconds faster now since concentric waves were one of the slowest drawing steps.

Overlay Images

In the right panel, I added a new Overlay tool. It allows you to add an overlay image to your map. It's useful if you have another map from another program and you want to trace it in Nortantis.

The "Enable overlay image" checkbox allows you to quickly show or hide the overlay image while you're working. The transparency slider allows you to control the transparency of the image so you can see what you're drawing behind it, and the two buttons at the bottom make it easy to position the image over the map.

Flip/Rotate New Maps

When creating new maps, you can now flip or rotate the world using 4 new buttons along the bottom of the Create New Map popup.

Flipping a map vertically or horizontally gives you the same land shape except flipped across the X or Y axis. Rotating the map is similar, and allows you to create maps that are tall and narrow instead of short and wide.

This option is only available when creating new maps, not existing maps, because it would be a lot more complex to handle with a map you've made edits to.

Solid Backgrounds

If you're making a political map instead of a parchment style map, then you'll likely want to use this feature. In the left panel, in the Background tab, you can now select a background option of "Solid Color". Here’s an example:

Click for higher resolution image.

Transparency

More colors now support transparency.

The ocean color can now be transparent to facilitate exporting your land shape to other programs (you'll probably want to also disable fray/grunge, disable text, and possibly remove any icons that protrude into the ocean).

When Background -> Land coloring method is set to Single Color, you can select a transparent land color. This could be useful if you want to add a custom background image using another program.

In the Border tab, the "Grunge/frayed edge color" now supports transparency so you can reduce the intensity of the grunge and frayed edge shading as desired.

Other Changes

• Frayed edges now have their own random seed in the Border tab. I added this because sometimes with larger fray sizes, the fray dips into the map in a place you might not want it to. Previously, frayed edges used the background seed.

• You can now zoom in and out while the map is drawing. As an added bonus, I fixed a bug while working in this feature, so now zooming using the mouse wheel is twice as fast.

• If you don’t like the default dark mode, you can change the UI theme using View -> Theme.

• I resized some of the built-in compass rose images. If you have a map that used those decorations, you might want to check that their size is still appropriate on your map.

• Other Bug fixes