The April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now available. Bubble Gum Fantasy is a whimsical and colorful style by new contributor Will B. Quick and easy to use, the style allows you draw maps like illustrations in computer or mobile games.
The April issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.
Everyone loves a pretty map, even me. But there is also more to maps than their visual appeal, it is the information they convey. An aerial photo of your hometown may tell you exactly how it looks visually and how it is laid out, but it provides very little information about what can be found where in the town. And this is what separates a map from a photo, the additional information it contains that explains what we see in the map.
Today I’ll look into a feature from City Designer – City Demographics. City Demographics in CD3 is a coloring system that lets you color buildings by function (for example residential, commerce, accommodation). This is also a toggle feature which means you can show a nice pretty map for illustrative purposes, and when you need demographics, you can simply turn it on temporarily. Continue reading »
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Welcome dear cartographers to another month of mapping goodness from the Profantasy community. Check out some of the great maps they shared on the forum and in our Facebook group.
We start of with RoyalScribe‘s ongoing work on the temple of Zhao Guang Si monastery with the Trial of the Elements, a wonderful dungeon map using DD3 Dungeon and a variety of other styles.
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If you’ve missed any of the live mapping sessions we do on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+, you’ll find them archived on YouTube. Here are the most recent ones:
We’re back on schedule with the March monthly symbols! We are climbing up towards the light this month, instead of descending of the dark of the dungeon. Height differences are always hard to depict on a top down map, so Mike has produced symbols that help with that. The “Outdoor Heights” symbol pack contains cliff edges, slopes, and a variety of helpful tools to navigate them, from rope ladders to climbing poles.
Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 4 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS4 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley is available for purchase here.
To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (so far only January 2025) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
Sorry for a little delay in getting the February symbols to you, but Mike was exceptionally busy. Hopefully we are now back on track and will get the March set to you this month. The February set brings you a colorful collection of mushrooms, fungi and lichen tp decorate the fungal caves of your mega dungeon. The monsters and other inhabitants do need something to eat after all!
Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 4 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS4 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley is available for purchase here.
To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (so far only January 2025) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
Here is the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. This month we have a treat for you with a wonderful new style by Sue Daniel. She created a top-down landscape style for sprawling, colorful continental maps, along with a mapping guide taking you through her process of map creation.
The March issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.
If you have ever looked into the art directory folders (symbols/fills) inside the CC3+ data directory, you may have noticed one thing, there appears to be four copies of every file. Why is that? And why is four files better than one file?
Well, the answer here comes down to quality and performance.
The main issue that occurs when computers need to display an image on the screen is that the image must be scaled to fit the place it is being displayed. And this is not a free operation for a computer, it is actually a bit of a resource-intensive one. If you look at any random overland map, like the example map from the manual shown here, you’ll see that it is full of symbols. But all those symbols are pretty tiny. When zoomed out so you can see the whole map on screen, even in full screen, each of those trees are only something like 25 by 25 pixels on screen. Obviously, the symbol itself is much bigger, because it is not supposed to just look good when zoomed out like this, but also when you zoom in closer. And that means that for every one of those trees, CC3+ will have to take a much larger image, load it in to memory, and then resize it there before putting it on screen. A modern computer can do that pretty fast, but a map doesn’t just have one symbol, it can have thousands of them. And this process needs to be done anew each time you change the map view, like scrolling or zooming.
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