Update for the next release...
Scale Height Map can now be used on specific biomes. Depending on how you do your settings, you can get some pretty interesting transitions between biomes. In this example, I scaled snow and wasteland up a lot and so I got these cliffs. Not exactly what you want on your actual map but it shows what you can do. With less scaling, you can still get specific biomes to be raised higher than others or lower mountains in specific biomes.
Below are 2 more examples, where I used separate Scale Height Map commands for each biome, with them scaling the biome up most for the highest biome and less for each lower biome. I also increased the smoothing for the biome transition area. The effect you get is a slight change in elevation between biomes. With a bit of adjustment, this has potential to make for some interesting maps.
Icons will now appear next to your selected command and any related commands. In this screenshot, I have a heightmap command selected, so all heightmap commands show the mountain icon next to them. This makes it easy to find all related commands. Different commands have different icons.
New command: Create Single Town. This new command lets you create a town in a specific location. It is not a replacement for using a Mask Map but gives you an alternate way to place towns in specific locations. Mask Maps let you specify where towns can be placed and they will be placed only within the bounds of the mask. This command lets you specify a starting point for the town and it will then generate a town in that area but the town is not confined to a specific location the way it would be with Mask Maps. You can select the town type that you want to place with this command.
New parameter for Create Towns allows you to balance the number of each tile variant you have on your map. Tile variants are tiles that share the same district and the same tile type. For example, if you have 5 tiles for the Residential district that are Corner tiles, this parameter will attempt to place an equal number of each of those 5 variants on your map. If unchecked, this is entirely random, making it possible to have a lot of one variant and none of another variant. Prior versions were random (i.e. unchecked). This will likely help those of you who are using custom tiles. It won't make much difference if you're only using vanilla tiles as there are not usually any variants to choose from, though it sounds like that may change in 1.0/A22.
New parameters weight_outskirt and weight_center for the Town Property List allow you to have more or less of specific districts in the center or outskirt area of your town. For example, if you have 3 districts (commercial, downtown, industrial) in the center of your town, you would normally get about the same number of tiles for each district. If you choose to weight the downtown district at twice the others, you will see about twice the downtown tiles in your town than the other districts.
These are in addition to the new items I mentioned above. And stamps are almost ready for initial testing, so we are getting closer to having them ready. There are also some new things that are being looked at that may or may not appear in the next release. These include creating plateaus, placing rivers along the transition area between biomes, so each biome is separated by a river, and automatically filling any basins (depressions) on your map with water, regardless of what elevation it is at on your map, if it meats certain criteria. So there are a lot of things to look forward to in the next release and the following releases.
