Dragonmeet, London’s friendliest gaming convention, is held again this year on the first weekend of December (December 1st) in London, at the Novotel in Hammersmith, like last year. ProFantasy will be there and you’re welcome to stop by to check our products, talk mapping or just say hello to yours truly (Ralf).
Look for us next to the Pelgrane booth. Final booth numbers have not been assigned, but the exhibitor’s hall should be small enough that we are easy to find. Look for the maps!
Welcome mappers to the October newsletter: Germany’s big board game convention, Spiel, is only days away, but we take the time to give you, news and resources for your enjoyment!
News
Resources
Articles
Remy over on the ProFantasy forum and the Facebook user group is running another community map challenge. It’s not too late to jump in and provide some extra maps to the wonderful community atlas project in the process.
And if you haven’t drawn such a map before, Why not use the opportunity to run through the City Designer 3 Essentials guide and learn to draw streets and houses along the way?
A new update for Campaign Cartographer 3+ is now available. We’ve done a lot of internal work (small bug fixes and improvements), but also improved some user interface issues and added a convenient new feature.
User Interface
Bitmap fill styles will now be displayed in a much larger format in any of the dialogs. That makes it much easier to recognize or judge one of the many detailed bitmap fills available in the template you are working on.
New Command
Have you ever wanted to enlarge or shrink the area of the map you’ve been working on? The new “Resize Drawing Area” command (available from the File menu) will now make this much easier and quicker. Just type in the new map dimensions, and the map border and background will scale to the new size, without affecting any of the content you’ve already drawn. From there you can add new content and enlarge the existing features with the help of the editing tools.
You can download the update from your registration page. It is available among the CC3+ files on the Downloads tab.
Version Notes
Here are the version notes for Update 18:
CC3+ Version 3.87
=================
– Added SCALEMAPEXT and SCALEMAPEXTM commands to scale map template things (MAP BORDER, BACKGROUND, and SCREEN).
– Added TOGL and TOGLF commands to toggle visibility of a specified layer.
– Added JPEGOPT, DWGOPT, EMFOPT, and FCWOPT commands to allow direct access to save options for the major file types.
– Added SYMPTFILTER command to support point filtering on symbol import. This change may reduce artifacts for some kinds of symbol creation.
– Added LISTCMDS command to list all of the available commands in the system (main program and XPs).
– Changed internal image representation to allow for more efficient imaging operations.
– Removed some unused legacy DLLs to reduce disk footprint.
– ZOOMSEL command should work better than it used to.
– Fixed crash with hotspots in symbols when the layer for the symbol reference is hidden.
– Fixed XML parser usage to properly serialize boolean values.
– Fixed rename problem with sheets that could cause effects to be added to the wrong sheet.
– Fixed out of memory error that could happen with certain drawings.
– Fixed memory corruption that could occur when reading an invalid drawing tool file.
– Fixed memory corruption and possible crash when dropping text longer than 4090 characters.
– Now visibly rejects attempts to drop unknown file types onto a drawing.
– Dropping a picture onto a drawing while holding down the Shift key now allows rotating and scaling the image.
– Dropping a picture onto a drawing from a browser no longer generates an old-style image entity.
– Widened the drop portion of fill style preview combo boxes to make it easier to read style names.
– Updated PNG loaders to improve protection against certain malformed image files.
– Built with Visual Studio 2017. Some code elements should be a bit faster.
– MenuConfig utility now offers better support for special path characters (#$@) in file names.
– Options button on Save As will respond better on higher-dpi displays.
– Floating prompt now displays better on higher-dpi displays (has a different visual appearance as well).
– Traveller sector importer now handles the new-style Traveller 5 sector file format.
This week is Spiel time, i.e. the world’s biggest boardgame consumer fair takes place in Essen, Germany. ProFantasy has been exhibiting there since at least 2000 and it is always great fun, if also a busy and tiring time.
For this year, the organizer (Merz Verlag) has vastly improved the available documentation and guides. The “Spiel Guide” is an actually useful piece with the hall plans and all exhibitors listed alphabetically by hall. Hopefully that should make it easy to find our booth 6G113, which is smack in the middle of hall 6. If you are looking for board games, it also contains a list of all the new games announced for Spiel.
Yours truly (Ralf) will be there and I’ll be happy to demo you any of the software, give you a glimpse at the upcoming Token Treasure and Cities of Schley, or just chat about maps, map-making and gaming in general. Hope to see you there!
The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2018 is now available and treads new paths for us. For the first time we’ve produced an hour-long tutorial ourselves to show you how to create an overland map from start to finish, using the Mike Schley Overland style. Also included is the detailed tutorial made we created in the video.
As this is a first for us we are very much interested in your feedback. Is the presentation at 1080px (make sure to use full-screen) okay? Do you need more detail for the commands used? Would rather see long tutorials like this, or shorter pieces explaining individual commands?
You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. If you are already subscribed, the October issue is now available for download on your registration page.
Welcome to the July newsletter, dear cartographers! While we are now preparing our yearly pilgrimage Gen Con – the Best Four Days in Gaming, we also have a lot of news for you. Dioramas 3 has now been released, and with the WW2 Interactive Altas we have updated the last of our product line to work with CC3+. Finally, the July Annual with its Dioramas 3 example and tutorial has been released. Our authors are no less busy: Remy Monsen explains how to dynamically show and hide features in a CC3+ drawing, while Pär Lindström discusses his experience of creating Annual issues and Sue Daniel digs into (or should we say “climbs unto”) roof architecture with her tutorial on creating realistically shaded onion domes.
News
Resources
Articles
GenCon 2018 – the Best 4 Days in Gaming – is coming up next week, and of course ProFantasy will be at the show.
Stop by at booth #1317 (we are sharing the booth with Pelgrane Press) to check out the new Dioramas 3, get a glimpse of what we are working on, or just chat with Simon, Ralf or Doug. We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Here it is: the full release of Dioramas 3. Pimp your game and create your own paper models with hundreds of new bitmaps and symbols to choose from.
Design your model in real-world scale and then print at whatever modeling scale you want to build. Pick a pre-defined model from our large range of samples and adjust it to your requirements, or build something new completely from scratch.
Dioramas 3 includes instructions for printing and assembling your paper model so you don’t need any prior experience in paper modelling and the included examples give you plenty of material to practice on.
Dioramas 3 is available as an upgrade from Dioramas Pro and features the following new material:
Get Dioramas 3 now from the ProFantasy online store. Or log into your registration page to grab the upgrade from Dioramas Pro.
If you want to try your hand at paper modeling with craft knife and glue before you jump fully into Dioramas 3, we have two examples buildings for you to download in pdf format.
Sage’s Tower
The reclusive sage dwells in this lonely tower somehwere on the outskirts of cilized lands. What will the adventurers find inside when they arrive to get his advice?
Village House, Church and Tower
A tiny village nestles into hills, sporting a few houses, a church and a lonely tower, guarding the townsfolk from marauding orcs and goblins.
Welcome to the June newsletter, dear cartographers! We take a look at the progress of Dioramas 3, and Remy helps us Understanding Styles in CC3+. Mike Schley writes about Mapping Narratives and Pär Lindström finishes his series with the third article on overland mapping. Finally, check out new Maps of the Month from the user community.
News
Resources
Articles
