I once was told that good software design is 95% user-interface.  In trying to live up to that, the design goals of HMES have been to provide a strong interface with a lot of features and flexibility.
Instead of only providing input controls on many of the dialogs, HMES provides graphical displays for instant visual feedback.  For example, the various editing dialogs such as for changing the altitude or size, or applying filtering or smoothing, provide large preview images of the operation.  Taking this even one step further, the preview image display is an interactive control that allows for 2D top, front and 1:1 panning views, and 3D wire, solid and shaded views with lighting and camera movement.  Many of the dialogs utilize two of these preview controls, one for the original view and one for the function preview.  The supported interactivity varies accordingly with each dialog to provide a strongly intuitive user experience.  Numerous settings and options are available, either in the main application Options dialog or on a preview control contextual menu.




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The most important part of any software application, in my opinion, is the user interface.

A well designed interface will provide better and faster productivity, with a lower learning curve for new users.  To this end, the interface on HMES has been tweaked a number of times to create a better user experience.  The interface is very visual, with most of the editing dialogs including large customizable 2D and 3D preview windows, and graphical state displays.

The software operates in two independant modes, Map Space and World Space, with the capability of passing the current heightmap between the modes.  Map space is similar to using high-end paint software and provides import, export, conversion, and editing of heightmaps with dimensions up to 32768x32768.  World Space is similar to using high-end modeling software and provides a wide variety of terrain creation, terraforming and geomorphing functions.
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