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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When you make your own symbol catalogs, either from new symbols, or just to create a re-mix of existing symbols, one of the main issues is how to make them easily accessible. Sure, you can always click the open symbol catalog button and browse for it, but that means you need to remember where it is, and it is more complicated than just clicking one of the symbol catalog buttons in the top toolbar.

But, if all the official catalogs can be loaded from those buttons, why not our own? It’s actually quite simple, so let us have a look.

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In most overland styles, such as the CC3 Mike Schley Overland you’ll find that when you draw a terrain, such as the hills, the edge of your polygon will fade into the land behind it, allowing for a smooth transition between the two. This is of course done by the Edge Fade, Inner effect, and will only be visible as long as effects are enabled.

So, well and fine, but now we want the central part of our hilly area to be mountainous, so we just use the drawing tool and draw us some mountain terrain on top of the hill terrain. But then we notice something, the mountain fill is not fading into the terrain fill beneath it. Now, why would that be? It is on the same sheet as the hill fill (the LAND FEATURES sheet in case of CC3 Mike Schley Overland), and that clearly fades, so what is up here?

The answer to that is simple, effects are per-sheet, not per-entity, so what the Edge Fade, Inner effect is fading the combined outline of all the entities on the sheet, not the outline of each individual entity. In my example case here, the mountain terrain is fully inside the hills terrain, so the outline is here described by the hills terrain alone. If the mountain terrain had been sticking out somewhere, we would have seen that that part of the mountain terrain would have had edge fading applied to it, as would be the case if we delete the hills altogether and just keep our mountains.

So, let us look at how to handle this. Continue reading »

When working with Campaign Cartographer 3+ you can make good looking maps quite easily. Templates come with the appropriate effects predefined, symbols and tools draw on the appropriate sheet automatically and most styles have a nice selection of symbols and fills to use in your map. With just a little bit of experience with CC3+ and it’s tools, you can quickly and easily throw together that battle map for tonight’s encounter. Sometimes however, it can be worth spending a little more time with the map, looking at the details and taking it from a good map to a great map.

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Whenever you start a new map in CC3+, it is always based on an existing template. But did you know you can easily create your own custom templates, ensuring that it already comes configured with your custom sheets and effects setup, your own fills, and more?

A template in CC3+ is really just a map. When you create a new map, what happens is that CC3+ makes a copy of the template for you as the starting point of your new map. So editing a template is just as simple as editing a map, the only trick with templates is knowing where to find them and where to put them.

Customizing templates is also the first step to creating your own custom style, which have been covered in other articles.

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I often use boxes to put information like a map key or the map title in as I like to separate these things from the map itself. Creating such a box is easy enough, I usually just use the Box command to draw an appropriate box with a nice fill on a dedicated sheet, slap a quick effect on it like edge fade and/or transparency and I am done. If you did the first map tutorial in the CC3+ user manual, this was one of the final steps when we completed the map in the text chapter.

But, what if I want to make it a little neater, like for example adding rounded corners to it? CC3+ doesn’t have a ready to go rounded corner tool out of the box, but we can easily assemble one ourselves with a few simple steps. And of course, once you have made the shape, you can throw whatever fills and effects on it that you want.

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Ever wanted to add your own buttons to the CC3+ toolbars? Perhaps you have a command you use frequently, or just want quick access to a symbol catalog?

CC3+ doesn’t have a built-in editor to do this, but all it takes is a few simple changes in a text file to make it happen.

In this blog post, I am going to go through the basics for adding a new button to your toolbar. To keep it simple, I’ll just focus on buttons, although there are other things you can do in the menu as well, such as adding pop-up menus when you right click a button, but I’ll just cover the basics for now.

If you like, you can also watch the basics of this article as a video, and then come back to check out additional details in the article later.

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One of the nice upgrades CC3+ brought with it back when it was released was the ability to include drawing tools in your symbol catalogs. Now, this is hopefully not news to you, as this is used quite a bit in the official symbol catalogs used in most styles. But this fact does make the symbol catalog window a bit smarter, since drawing tools can do quite a bit of things, like I discussed in my article about Advanced Drawing Tools earlier this year.

This means that the tools we add to our symbol catalog doesn’t have to be limited to drawing shapes that fit the theme of the symbols in the catalog, but also tools that can do powerful things like running macros to almost everything we want.

The feature of putting drawing tools into the symbol catalog is simple enough, it is the possibilities that this opens that make it exiting.

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Most of you have heard about macros. If you are an existing CC3+ user you’ve used them, knowingly or not, and you might even have written your own. For some people, the word macro may sound a little scary because it is associated with programming, but they’re really not that complicated.

Macros are used in a lot of places in the program. For example, when you start a new map or load an existing map, CC3+ uses a macro (stored in the OnNewMacro/OnOpenMacro map notes) to show you the appropriate toolbars and load the filters needed for the style of the map. A lot of the drawing tools uses macros to accomplish the more complex stuff, for example the forest drawing tools use a macro to call the commands to fill the area with trees, or the fields drawing tools in several styles use a macro to align the fields to the first edge of the polygon (These macros are stored with the drawing tools).

Lastly, CC3+ also has a macro file that contains named macros. These are often called from the toolbar buttons and menu elements in the program, so editing this file may change how the program behave.

And then we have script files….

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There are several ways to organize your maps, both inside and outside of CC3+. We’ve previously talked about linking your maps together to make a navigable atlas, and how to index your maps to make them easy to search to find the map you want. Today, I’ll talk about the bookmark feature in CC3+. Using bookmarks, you can create lists of maps, for examples maps belonging together, or maps with a common theme. For example, in the community atlas, I have bookmarks for the different types of maps, for example one bookmark set that contains all the overland maps, one the contains all the dungeon maps, and so on.

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