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 »

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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One nice thing you can do with CC3+ maps is to have multiple views embedded in one map. For example, in the Forest Trail annual style, you can choose if you want to see the treetops, like you would normally see a location in a forest if viewed from above, or if you want to hide the canopies so you can see what actually goes on under the trees, quite important for a battle map.

There are also cases where you want to make a map with private information for the gamemaster, and a public version of the map for the players.

Or maybe you need an overland map with a lot of information, perhaps showing both political information, economical information and climate information, but showing it all at the same time looks pretty messy.

Of course, if you have used CC3+ even just a little bit, you know that I am talking about hiding and showing sheets here. For the overland map, you can have one sheet with a political overlay, one with economic information, and one with a climate overlay, and only show the desired sheet, simple enough. For your GM’s secrets, just put them on a sheet by themselves that you hide when you export the player map.

But, what if your view requires switching on and off multiple sheets? Due to different effects, that political overlay may actually consist of one sheet with political borders, one sheet with the text associated with the information, and maybe another sheet with symbols related to this overlay. Once you have multiple sheets involved, it can get a bit harder to turn on/off the right sheets for any given occasion, which is what we’ll have a short look at today.

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Macros in CC3+ can be used for a variety of tasks, so today I thought I would explore macros by having a little bit of fun. I wanted to write a macro that could decorate my maps with randomly placed tiny snowflakes in spirit of the winter season.

In this case, I made a macro that draws small snowflakes in random location all over the map, each snowflake being generated randomly. The snowflakes themselves are just simple white lines, which can then be enhanced by adding sheet effects to them.

In this article, I’ll just present and explain my macro, if you are new to macros you may want to start with my Getting Started with Macros series first: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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Symbols in CC3+ comes with a lot of advanced functionality beyond simply placing down an icon in your map. One of of the entries on that list is symbol attributes.

Symbol attributes are text entities that are embedded into the symbol, but allow the user to set their value when placing the symbol. This allows a single symbol to have a kind of dynamic content. this can be used for many purposes; one of the more common one is for scale bars. By default, most scale bars in CC3+ are designed to be 100 miles or feet long. But instead of hard-coding the number 100 in the symbol, the scale bars use attributes, so if you need a shorter scale bar, you can just place it at 0.5 scale and type 50 as the attribute value. This means you only need to define a single symbol, and it can be used for multiple scales, instead of having a small fixed set with common values. The text you enter becomes part of the symbol, so it will follow along if you move the symbol around.

Other uses for attributes are placeable signs with user-defined text, modern military unit counters with identification text, and much more.

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During the last few months, we ran the celebratory competition for the 1000th map in the Community Atlas Project. The competition is now over, and Royal Scribe won the honor of getting the official 1000th map in the atlas, while Ricko Hasche took home the prize for best map by community vote. You can see all the winners, and check an image gallery containing all the maps.

The Winning Entry: Metzvel by Ricko Hasche

I thought I could continue on with the topic of the atlas today, and give a little overview of the macros I use in the project, both in the maps themselves, and the ones I use when processing the maps. To avoid making this a 10-part series, this will just be a basic overview of them, to give people ideas how they can utilize macros in their own mapping.

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We have reached the final article in the series about making mapping tiles. In previous articles (Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4) we discussed how to design such tiles, how to print or export them for use in other software, and how to make raster symbols in CC3+ from them so we could use the tiles for assembling maps quickly.

But, as we pointed out in the earlier articles, exporting static bitmap images have some limitations. For example, if you rotate them, you change the direction of shadows and patterns in the fill. One could just call it an acceptable tradeoff and move on, but there is a better way, and that is to turn these tiles into advanced symbols in CC3+. By making symbols that contain the actual entities in the tiles instead of static images, directions of fills and effects are calculated when the tiles are used, not when you originally make them, and it also allow you to actually change the content after placing them. In short, if you are going to make maps using the tiles inside CC3+, this is the best approach, so let us dig into how to achieve this.

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Previously in this series, we have developed a set of tiles which we can use to build a space station of any size. Sure, more variation would have been nice, but the four tiles we made are actually enough for any size space station, as long as we accept that it has to be shaped like a rectangle. The previous articles should have given you the information needed to make more tiles though, such as making an inner corner to complete the set and allow for a more complex shape.

Last time, we did look at how to export and print the tiles. Printed tiles could be assembled on the fly at the gaming table, while the exported images are great for combining in just about any program, like an image editor, a Virtual TableTop, or even CC3+ itself. And this is what we will be focusing on in this article, how to use the tiles in CC3+. There are two options here, either we can import the images we exported as symbols and use those, or, instead of exporting our tiles in the first place, we could create symbols directly from the tiles themselves. This latter option gives us some interesting options we will look at in the next installment, but today, we’ll look at creating bitmap symbols.

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I recently finished my 11-year long AD&D campaign with an epic final boss battle. And a good boss battle obviously need a good battle map.

My group is playing in-person, but we use a Virtual Table Top program displayed on a projection screen for our battles. This allow us to zoom out/in on various area, and have a more flexible approach to the area, but for those that prefer using physical miniatures, printing is of course an option as well.

For this project, I did most of the work in CC3+, but it involves using the VTT software as well (MapTool in my case). I’ll keep this article more an overview of the process rather than diving down into the technical details or making a detailed tutorial, but I invite anyone who has any questions regarding the process to drop by the ProFantasy Community Forums and post their questions there, and I will be happy to help.

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In the prior installments of this series (Part 1 – Part 2), we looked at how to create mapping tiles using CC3+. Such tiles can be great for quick mapping, because you can just assemble them in whatever way you need to provide a huge amount of possibilities.

Now that you have your tiles, the big question is of course, how will you use them? I’ll consider 4 main methods. the first of them is simply doing as we did while developing them in part 2, just having the tiles placed off to one side in the map and make copies to slot into place, but I find that a bit inefficient. A far better option if you are going to use them in CC3+ is to define them as symbols, which I will look at in a later installment. Today, I’ll consider the last two options, namely exporting them as images that can be used in any application, including CC3+ itself, and printing them, giving you physical tiles to assemble on the fly at the gaming table. Bot these options have several things in common, so it makes sense to talk about them at the same time.

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