Looking good: CC3 installs and runs fine in the Windows 8 Developer preview.

We’ve updated the Fractal Terrains demo to version 3, so you can try out the new functionality of our random world builder at your leisure.

You can download the 14-day-trial version of FT3 from our demo page.

More information on Fractal Terrain 3 is available on its product page.

The video shows how the different armour parts of a CA3 figure can be layered over each other to make any custom combination of parts.

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com

I’ve always been very fond of Dwarves and their mines as a great location for an adventure. I guess you can blame this on Tolkien and his description of Moria. I still remember how excited I was when I saw the Lord of the rings on TV for the first time (now we’re talking about the old film, not the new ones) and they entered the old mines full of orcs.

This map however is only of the entrance to a Dwarven kingdom. It is made in the Dungeon Designer 3 add on for Campaign Cartographer 3. The style used is from the 2011 annual, Jon Roberts Dungeon. This particular style is actually free for anyone to download.

When I map some kind of fortification I always try to picture how an attack on the area would be done. How could I defend the area in the best way? Whoever that want to get past the fort has to pass through the entrance hall (1) on the map. So I wanted the entrance hall to be well guarded, I accomplished this through the watchroom (5) next to it. From there the guards can watch who enters and also shoot at them. The inner iron door will hopefully prohibit any hostile intruders from getting any further in.

The two towers facing the outside (4a-b) are also good spotting areas from where you can see who’s approaching as well who’s standing in front of the gates. I try to continue thinking in this way while mapping, other important aspects are where will the guards sleep, eat or relax? Remember this is a place where the guards probably spend a week at a time before they are relived.

In the end I also added the secrete passage (11). This passage shouldn’t really be there because it is a huge security risk. The reason I put it there was that if some adventurers need to sneak in past the guards they need a way to do it. So the passage was added to make the map more fun to use in an adventure.

This was the first map I made in Dungeon Designer 3. The program however I feel is the most complicated one from Profantasy, mainly because there are so many different things you can add and have to take into account. It took me a long time to realize that I in this map actually by mistake used the wrong beds and tables (they are from another style then the one I intended to use). So it was very good to have the pdf from the annual style to use as a guide while exploring the program. This however doesn’t mean that this is a bad program in any way, probably the contrary. But it crave from you as a user that you take the time to learn it.

News

• The kind people over at the Vintyri Project have released their textures in CC3 format. Their symbols libaries are to follow.
• The March edition of the Cartographer’s Annual is out. Download an A2 PDF of Ralf’s amazing example map.
• See a preview of the forthcoming 3D dungeon style for the Annual
• Remy Monsen is now laying out the latest Tome of Ultimate Mapping. We hope it will be ready in April. Everyone who bought the Tome after the release of CC3 will get a free update. He wrote about the Tome last month.

Articles

• Dwarven Gate – dungeon mapping by Pär Lindström
• Armour Assembly – Rich Longmore’s video shows how Character Artist 3 is coming along
• Mapping Cities 7: Houses Galore! Steve Davies continues his city design series

We are very happy to release another drawing style by fantasy cartographer Jonathan Roberts – this time it’s a city style, completing the standard trilogy of map types. Jon Roberts’ overland and dungeon styles were released last year in the Annual Vol 5, the latter being a free download. You can subscribe to the current annual here.

There’s also a little preview of the upcoming April issue, created by another extremely talented fantasy cartographer and artist, Herwin Wielink.

A little peek at the work-in-progress on one example map for the March Annual:

Also, a little sneak peek at the April issue:

When Simon and I discussed how to fully integrate the city creator, code named “Map Invoker”, the idea of it working like a Wizard surfaced. 

With a wizard like interface, each layer of objects (Waterways, Roads, Walls, etc.) would each be generated by a different page on the wizard.  A “generate” button would draw the objects directly in CC3.  If the results were not what the user wanted, the user could press the “generate” button again and the old objects would be removed and the new ones drawn.  Once the user liked the output, the “next” button would take the user to the next wizard page.

Now this sounded like a great design to me.  But …. I had some technical issues to overcome and some design work to make life a little easier.

The main technical issue was that the built-in dialog system was not made to ever run custom code and call XP functions while the dialog was still visible.  This was solved by using C# to write the Dialog code and communicating with CC3 via a simple callback class and a delegate.  I will go into this solution in depth in a later post.  Right now I want to go over the design work I did to make life easier passing data back and forth between C++ & C#.

Here is the diagram of my classes thus far.  They are simple value classes, with no behavior.  In a previous experiment, I created a REAL object (data & behavior) but because of the fact that a real class crosses native and managed code, it worked great in a all C++/cli environment, but I could not use it in C#.  So I decided to split data and behavior into two separate dlls.  The cc3objects.dll, a C# set of value classes and cc3actions.dll, the C++/cli dll that implements the behavior.

Now, what this does is let me create an entire object, or set of objects that can be directly converted to native CC3 objects.  So, I actually build my objects in C# then pass them to my C++/cli XP dll.  Plus, once I get done with this project everyone will be able to use these dlls.

The February issue of the Annual 2012 elaborates on a style introduced in Cosmographer 3: The satellite view overland map. This large-scale, straight overhead style evokes the view a satellite might have on the landscape below. Seamlessly-tiling textures are smoothed together through sheet effects to create the image of an unbroken, natural landscape.

The source for the textures is taken from public domain images made available by NASA through their Visible Earth website. The texture are carefully crafted from these originals and made into CC3 bitmap fill styles.

While it served as an inspiration, Cosmographer 3 is not required to make full use of this style. See the Annual 2012 site for more information on this style.

Check out this large-scale (A2) example map created in the Annual Overland Satellite style.

The February issue is available for subscribers now!

News

The Cartographer’s Annual 2012 subscription is out now. See previews of January, February,  and March, and the the Annual 2012 site.

The Cartographer’s Annual 2011 is out now – read a summary of the monthly content here.

Articles

• Help us Decide on a Crowdsourced Project
• 2011 Business Overview
• Next Year’s Releases
• Building A Better World – The New Tome of Ultimate Mapping

Art Preview

This is one female paper doll for Character Artist 3.