I'm not familiar with "X". Do you have a link? And don't worry about the questions thing.

The original purpose of FT was to provide random worlds for CC2. I included a number of things beyond the original spec and I think that's what trips up a lot of folks. FT is a compromise between what machines could do in 1999 and what I knew how to do in 1999 (the basin fill and distance transform code, for example, were things that I didn't have any notion of back then but that have turned out to be very important for common terrain processing). There are still a lot of design decisions from back then that color what I can do with FT without breaking everyone's existing content. FT also has a number of experimental and not-quite useful features that probably should have been removed (Moundtain is an excellent example). BTW, I have heard a rumor that the demo version of FT might have a bug in its "Special MDR" file save code that allows you to output an arbitrary-resolution MDR file (a format the Wilbur can read). There are a number of tutorials out there for FT, but I haven't made a full link page for them ( Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild is an example of one that should be linked better).

The original purpose of Wilbur was as a toy to try out image processing and terrain-processing things (well, the real purpose was a little darker, but I won't go into that here). In many ways, Wilbur is a lot like everyone's favorite toy, MS-Paint, with the limitation that it's grayscale-only and renders that grayscale image in strange ways. As a toy, documentation was always low priority. There is also arrogance on my part in giving away Wilbur for free: you get what you get and I'm willing to offer a full refund of what you paid me at any time (note that it costs me money to host Wilbur). I should definitely push together the links to the various Wilbur tutorials out there, though. As a toy, though, it's purpose is for fun and always takes a back seat to paying work.

The biggest single problem with FT3 and Wilbur is ultimately that they are part-time projects for me. I have a more-than-full-time job, a part-time job, and a family with small children; I just don't have as much time to devote to playtime software development as I'd like.

Note that ProFantasy has invested time in writing an FT manual. More than once, in fact. There is even a nice FT section in their "Tome of Ultimate Mapping" product and some video tutorials online, I think. I have found that the problem with writing a big manual is that (a) most people these days seem unwilling to read an actual manual and (b) that it's virtually impossible to cover all of the various ways that users want to use what is ultimately a bag of tools. Trying to show all of the variations on a command is a tough task, especially if a command doesn't make sense without a previous context (I have "enjoyed" quite a few irate users for various products over the years that want to know why feature X doesn't work as shown in the manual when they didn't read the preceding steps that established the necessary context). The original FT manual that I wrote had some sections showing variations on some of the less obvious commands (see the example below), but later authors seem to have gone more for a task-oriented approach and less for a catalog of features.

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