Hmmm there is alot there. OH thanks on the birthday wish. Yeah it was yesterday. Im telling everyone not to sweat it. Its next year on my demi-centennial that I want alot of do about it. Everyone can give me my mid-life crisis presents then.
Logical independent positioning is is definately possible. So is logical assignment of names of provinces (the Dark Woods, Shambler Lake, Rigid Mountains) or logical placement of magic sites. The .map file has info on terrain and neighbors which can be read and interpretted, then add commands for logical assignment of those things instead of random each time the map is played on.
The large blocky areas can be broken up more by switches to dommap but the results are always a range. Improving the settings I use would at this point have to get into seperate settings for each of the 6 map sizes I run.
GIMP effects are good. Unfortunately I run the maps on a linux with no Xwin gui environment. Getting a gimp script to run non-interactively is supposed to be possible but I never got it to work. So at the moment Im limited to command-line options. Ones that are in dommap such as the blur, or ones made available with ImageMagick, things like that.
I might add back the option for "blank" maps (no terrain except just brown land or blue water) so more people can build on them by pasting in terrain icons.
Gandalf Parker