May updates, new story preview, etcetera

Hello hello, fuzzies :) I hope that spring is treating you well, and you're taking care of yourselves and staying... at least in reasonably good spirits. I will keep this short! First off, some updates as to what's changed since the last post, aside from me having, uh, more free time than I used to :P

"Through Great Cloudy Skies" is uploaded to SF and to writing.dog; I hope that people like(d) this story—it's set in Cannon Shoals, but about a hundred years ago so there's no requirement you be deeply involved in Shoals mythology :p I wrote it in an attempt at being more optimistic, so, it's also an optimistic Shoals story.

I have a draft of the next Dark Horse episode basically finished, so that will also go in the queue to be edited and posted. Given that it's proving hard to follow through with that, I am going to post stuff here in draft form, in parallel, starting with the first new chapter of Terra Nova. Beyond that, I also have a new dieselpunk story finished, though, uh... waiting while I try to decide if it's a little more bent than I want to go with. We'll see. Antics on a zeppelin!

I've also started serious work on a new moreauverse... novel (?), for those of you who like that. I'm not sure it will be a "novel"; I want to try an experiment with making it more like... The Martian Chronicles, or something, where it's mostly discrete stories linked by a common theme. That theme is the aftermath of Hatikvah, the moreauverse independence novel. Nothing stable enough to post, yet, but probably by the next update.

In terms of new worldbuilding, I've added an article to writing.dog explaining the organization of the Iron Corps, the mercenary army fielded by the Carregan Railroad. There's also supposed to be a table of organization and equipment, but I haven't decided how that should be formatted yet. There are also new words added to the Nakath and Tiurishkan dictionaries, so, uh, update your study guides?

That said, most of the updates are background stuff with the map engine. To start with, I've fixed a few bugs: the Hatikvah map's rivers were all the wrong size, and there was a long-standing bug where menu choices that should've only allowed one option were initialized with multiple options selected. More embarrassingly, I cheated on the scale used in the map legend, which meant it was not always accurate. That is now fixed.

Even more embarrassingly, there was a bug in the SVG=>KML converter that caused vertices to be inappropriately culled. That's also fixed, and by "embarrassingly" I mean six conditionals used "and" instead of "or" in checking whether a path was valid. Ahem. Along with fixing this, I've optimized map data generation to reduce file sizes by about 50% with no (apparently) drop in quality. So, if you want to use the map engine for your own purposes, it's getting... closer to almost functional.

There is, however, a slight issue in the way I've been building the maps, which is starting to come to a head. The topographic maps (used for contour lines and height shading) are extremely time-consuming to create, and it simply doesn't scale; terrain contouring also takes up the majority of processing time used by the engine. So, I'm experimenting with a new way of handling this, which I'm going to trial with the Cannon Shoals map because it's, uh... small :P I'll keep you posted as it goes, but here's the current state of the area:

More work needs to be done, particularly south of the river (the river will also get a new curve to match a ridgeline north-east of town where the state park is) but my hope is that this will become a better way of creating geography that is both better and less mind-numbing to edit.

Anyway! That about does it here. Again: I hope you've been well, and... yeah. Looking forward to summer >.> You are wonderful people, and I'm incredibly lucky that I get to do stuff for ya.