What the hell has happened to all the maps? The sleak outlines of the states, coast lines and Caribbean islands has now had some kid at them with a thick felt-tip pen and it looks shit. You can’t even see 70% of the Caribbean islands now as it’s just one huge mass of ‘blob’. Why can’t people leave alone stuff that isn’t broken.
So, uh, Rob. How do you really feel? Please. Don’t hold back.
What maps?
Look at something like AAL2022 to see the mess it’s become. Just one huge blob instead of the clearly defined lines and it’s even worse when you zoom in.
rob…I didnt see anything either…dude easy on the Lager… 
I used AAL2022 as an example and it looks normal to me - the usual FA classic view.
The lines do look thicker, but not like feces as RobK suggested. I think it makes the islands more visible, which isn’t necessarily bad.
Better question, RobK. Who let the their kid to your computer…? It’s not FA’s problem… 
Rob K,
Do you ever have anything positive to say, or contribute to these forums?
You are a whining bitch and I for one am sick of reading your gripes.
It’s not your specific complaint, but your sense of entitlement that irks me.
IT"S A FREE SITE, you’re entitled to NOTHING…
Now if you have constructive criticism, that’s great, but to say the site looks like sht because it may not meet your needs is not fair to the staff that works very hard putting out a GREAT product, so in short, FCK OFF!
So, uh, deef. How do you really feel? Please. Don’t hold back.
(thanks for the template pika)
The state and country borders are now anti-aliased. Also, country borders are twice as thick. These are two separate changes, though they came at the same time. We may look into moving country borders back to their original thickness.
Also notice that the thick country borders stay the same absolute thickness at any zoom level. As you zoom in, they’ll appear to get thinner.
Anti-aliasing should look significantly better when viewed at 100%, that is each monitor pixel corresponds to a screen pixel, no page zoom. Diagonal and wavy lines should not look jaggy or have a stairstep pattern which reveals individual pixels.
Rob K, are you certain you have your display’s resolution set correctly? If you’re using an LCD display rather than a CRT you must use the display’s default resolution or you’ll soon run into problems with images in keeping with what you’ve described.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_resolution
“While CRT monitors can usually display images at various resolutions, an LCD monitor has to rely on interpolation (scaling of the image) which causes a loss of image quality. An LCD has to scale up a smaller image to fit into the area of the native resolution. This is the same principle as taking a smaller image in an image editing program and enlarging it; the smaller image loses its sharpness when it is expanded. This is especially problematic as most resolutions are in a 4:3 aspect ratio (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1600x1200) but there are odd resolutions that are not, notably 1280x1024. If a user were to map 1024x768 to a 1280x1024 screen there would be distortion as well as some image errors, as there is not a one-to-one mapping with regard to pixels. This results in noticeable quality loss and the image is much less sharp.”
(Emphasis added.)
Looking at maps zoomed way out, I agree with robk that the two-pixel-width lines are too wide.
We will be re-rendering the tiles soon (there are hundreds of thousands) to include water features and when we do that we’ll switch back to one-pixel lines, although we will continue to use the new antialiased-style lines.
To Lucent & Karl, thanks for the replies.
The jagged lines are not an issue as the level of detail required to have them look like real life when zoomed in would take an aeon and you wouldn’t really gain anything by doing so.
Karl I am glad that you also agree with me that the new lines are rather chunky for their purpose. If you are zoomed in and watching a specific area (especially near the islands) then the flight ID tags get lost under the thick lines and you can’t read what they are (yellow writing on a bright colour doesn’t work… ), hence my “moan”.
New tiles are up, and IMO they look great.
Many changes were made to the new maps, the least of which was reducing country boundries back to the same thickness as state boundaries.
The world map contains significantly more detail. Islands and coastlines look more natural and are higher resolution.
Lakes, bays, and rivers were added, including the Great Lakes and Puget Sound. As you zoom deeper, minor rivers and streams appear as well.
Interstate highways are thicker than other highways when you are zoomed in enough to see both.
If you’re not seeing lakes on the maps, you’ll need to empty your browser cache. We’re always interested in hearing your feedback to these changes, positive or negative.
Crisp guys! Nice work!
Mark, Lucent - good work chaps! Looks real nice now from what I’ve seen so far. 
Thanks Rob, we appreciate it.
People may need to empty their browser cache to pick up the new tiles, although any old ones that are locally cached will expire within a few days in any case.