Countries 2 by Skybase

Countries 2 by Skybase
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/7506.html

Uhh okay a much more detailed list of updates:

1. Uses the same structure, but less nodes. Removed the ugly and odd combination of thresholds and highpasses that was significantly making the process slower. It's been reorganized significantly from the first edition.

Additionally took some effort to just use blends to make color variations in the sea. It's a significantly big step for speed.

2. The ugliness of the randomize basically comes from the "color" control node. I got rid of it because FilterForge does not select colors harmonically, instead its been replaced with the 360 hue selector. Further made improvements to limit the randomness by just simply adding remapping ranges for certain things.

To also add consistency when randomizing, I removed features such as turn outline on/off or countries and so on. Helps the visual effect when you randomize every time.

Because FilterForge doesn't lock certain controls from being randomized, I got rid of the "line thickness." I personally thought it was ugly when the random values turn out to make terrible, black lines.

Better color handling generally leads to better randomization. So I changed several blend modes for the ocean. The ocean also uses a better method of handling its color. It's now limited to certain blues that WILL work 100% no matter what.

3. For a much precise control of just the land, there is a Randomize Landshape control which uses the noise distortion. Really makes a difference when you want a different shape for a land, but you don't want to randomize other values.

4. The overall structure has been made into steps! It's easier to study the structure and easier to maintain, instead of having nodes that fly all over the place.

5. Speed: yes its faster. Damn faster. It's been benched mark on 2 computers and the calculations generally come out as around 2.46 times faster than the first edition. Probably because its using less nodes and its much more cleaner and simpler than version 1. The focus on the randomizor also helped remove potentially insignificant features. It also just attempts to focus on stylistic aspects so I made it look REALLY like a map. Light colors, water-color like overlays Yes it helps the looks.

And that is as detailed as I can get. The structure should be pretty telling of what's been changed. A lot of things are gone.