First of all, thanks to Punt for creating mapgenerator. I used Dragon many years ago and was generally happy with it, but it needed a lot of manual map editing to fix the problems. This time around with new maps required, I decided to try out the new tools especially as we were wanting to use different maps (eg Ilshenar, Malas and the bigger ML sized Trammel).
MapGenerator2 has been hard to track down with lots of broken links, but we did locate it finally. After all, a lot of people were recommending it.
Although we've perhaps managed to figure out most of it, I seem to recall reading that there was a how-to tutorial for it. I don't mean a tutorial about how to create a map from the menus, that one was useful as a basic introduction, but a tutorial on how to get the best out of the program.
I have to tell you, the biggest surprise to me was finding that you needed to set water at 0 for it to create water on the map at -5. I also wasn't sure of what deep and shallow water meant until I stumbled on the answers.
I was then interested in the xml files and was surprised that there was no defined entry for uneven ground with random static items. After playing with it, I saw no real reason not to have both, with unvenness set to Adjust="0,2". Stuff buried in the ground slightly seems to look fine, even trees!
I know I am just rambling, but it has driven my artist friend crazy trying to figure all this out from just the files and me to assist her. Some folk are artistic and some are technical and she is experiencing a lot of frustration. What would really have helped was a tutorial explaining all the things you can tweak via editing the xml files and the idiosyncracies of the program itself. Ideally of course, the utility itself would have a config menu to edit these, but for a limited user base that's probably not worth all the work required.
Finally, to the question - is there such a tutorial or are we meant to be smart and figure it out?
Does anyone else have the time to jot down all the features and gotchas with this program?