A few months ago, I started the Rails & Trains mini-series of articles. In the two prior installments (part 1 – part 2), we looked at how to make the tracks themselves, now it is time to round it out by looking at rail cars.

We’ll have a look at how to draw the insides of a rail car based on a real blueprint, giving us a nice scene for a handout or battle. I am going to base my drawing on a blueprint from the early 19-hundreds. I mainly picked these because it is difficult to find older blueprints online with proper dimensions, and because the trains of that time still had the same basic layouts as earlier trains, making it easy to adapt them to earlier times. Of course, my procedure here works fine with any blueprint, so if you’re mapping for a modern train, just grab the appropriate blueprint and possibly a different drawing style better suited for modern maps, such as SS3.

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CC3+ maps are more than just pretty illustrations of the area your players happen to adventure in. If you like to keep track of time passing in your game (or your novella) you need to know how long it will take your players to travel from Snowport to Knight’s landing. And to do that, you’ll naturally need to know the distance, and the terrain traveled through. The latter is easy enough to read visually from the map, and sure, you can provide an estimate for the former using the scale bar. However, this gets more and more inaccurate the more winding the road is though, maybe they are even traveling along an extremly winding river.

Instead of trying to estimate complex distances like that, CC3+ has built-in tools that lets you easily measure distances, both in straight lines, but also along a meandering path. Using these tools you can get the exact answer in seconds when the players ask about the distance/travel time, and get the same answer every time.

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In my previous two installments of this series, I’ve looked at the basics of macros and how to use variables. Today, I’ll be rounding off this introductory series by having a look at program flow. The macros we have looked at so far have just been a row of instructions, which are executed one by one, but it is also possible to make branching logic and loops. For example, you can do different things based on what the user chooses, or you can run the same block of code multiple times. For example, if you’ve had a look at my Large Exports annual, it contains the code required for exporting a small section of the map, and then it just loops over the same code enough times to export the entire map as smaller chunks.

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Last month, I talked about the basics of macros, how a macro is basically just a series of commands executed in sequence. And for the majority of macros used in CC3+, it actually stops there. For example, one of the more common uses of macros are as part of drawing tools, where you draw a polygon with the tool, and then a macro built into the tool takes over and does it’s magic to the polygon, such as filling with with symbols (like trees for a forest), or automatically align the fill or other similar operations.

But of course, that the majority of macros used are rather simple doesn’t mean we doesn’t have more advanced functionality that is highly useful. For this month’s part, we’ll be talking about variables.

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If you are a novice CC3+ user, you may think that macros sounds way to complicated to even touch. But, the fact is that from the moment you start making a map, you have already been exposed to several macros. You might not have noticed, but CC3+ uses macros for quite a lot of things. Every time you start a new map or load an existing one, a macro is run to set up the environment appropriately for that type of map. A lot of the buttons on the toolbars and elements in the menus call macros, and many of the drawing tools have embedded macros that are being run when you draw something with them.

So, why don’t we take a brief look at the basics of macros?

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One of the things that are easily overlooked when mapping local scale overland maps for gaming is the sheer numbers of settlements that traditionally dot the countryside. In medieval times, the distances between them could be surprisingly short compared to our modern standards, simply because we are used to larger settlements (and faster transportation) these days.

Now, dotting a landscape with settlements is pretty easy with CC3+, as we have great tools for doing this. To ensure randomness, we can have symbols randomly picked for each placement, we can use Symbols Along to place them along a road, and we can use Symbols in Area to fill a large plain with settlements. Great, job done.

Well, if you try to do this with a standard overland map, you’ll quickly notice that this doesn’t seem to work as desired for this purpose. You’ll notice that the groups in the settlement symbol catalog are set up with groups containing just a single symbol, including varicolor versions of that symbol. Now, that is not going to help us spread settlement symbols of various sizes easily as we wanted.

What we are seeing here is really the fact that you can’t organize everything for every imaginable purpose. It is similar to sorting your contact list on your phone. Should it be sorted by last names or first names? Last names are probably more formally correct, and it ensures that all the people from the same family appear next to each other, but you’re probably more used to refer to people by their first name, making them easier find for you when sorted that way. Neither way is wrong, but you can only have one of them at a time. Symbol catalogs are similar. When making them, the creator need to figure one sensible way to offer them, and then leave it to the users to rearrange things when needed. And that is what I will be showing today. I am using Mike Schley Overland for the example here, but this can of course be done with any map type and any style.

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Last month, I talked about how to draw railroad tracks for your maps. In that article, we looked at how to draw the basic tracks and sleepers, and adding appropriate effects to make them look nice. But we can’t stop with just straight track segments, can we? Of course not, we’ll be needing to make ourselves some nice curves. Fortunately, CC3+ has the tools needed to be able to take our railroads to the next step.

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Trains and Rails are useful for all kinds of mapping. From the humble carts on a track used in mines, to daring train heists in the Wild West, through subways and all the way to modern high-speed bullet trains. They can be used for battle maps to play out interesting encounters, as scenery in your mine maps and part of the infrastructure of your city.

In this first part I’ll be having a look at creating the basic tracks.

(I’ll also be looking at this in tomorrow’s live stream, so join the stream or watch the archived video later if you wish a video version of this)

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In CC3+, we use polygons a lot. They are used when you draw a landmass, they are used when you draw the floor of your building, they are used for your terrain fills and so on. Basically, when you work with a CC3+ map, there are 3 main types of entities you deal with, your symbols (places, objects, markers and more), your polygons (for filled areas like landmass and floors) and your lines (for walls, roads and similar).

Now, for this article I am going to have a little look at how we can do things like split our polygon up into two pieces, for example if we only need part of it for another map. And, I am also going to look at how to properly join up two polygons into one, as due to various factors, just drawing two partially overlapping polys and leaving them at that doesn’t always work.

In truth, lines and polys are mostly the same thing, the main difference is that polygons are closed (i.e. the programs draws a closing segment between the end node and back to the start node) while lines do not have this closing segment. When we are splitting and joining out polygons, we’ll actually be temporarily turning them into lines, so it is worth noting already now that having the fill apparently disappear while doing this is completely normal, and it will return when we are done. This also means that the procedures described here are the same for both lines and polygons, except you don’t close up lines at the end.

If you’re after extracting part of your map to make a detailed local map from a regional map, you may also wish to check out my Large to Small – Going from Regional Maps to Local Maps article.

Now, I use landmasses for my example here, but this works exactly the same way with floors in dungeon maps and all polys in all other map types as well.

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I’ve always loved some interactivity in my maps, especially the dungeon ones. It is fun adding secret doors that can be opened, rotating sections, and other surprises. If you watched my latest live stream, you saw me build a hedge maze with a rotating central section, where the inner region was only reachable if you rotated the it first using a clickable hotspot in the map. (You’ll find both a link to the recording as well as my map in this forum conversation.)

I thought I could show you a couple of more examples of nice easy macros you can assign to your hotspots to accomplish interesting results, and hopefully come away with an expanded understanding of macros at the same time.

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