In 1998 we instituted the coveted Master Mapper award for excellence in cartography. You can see the hall of fame here. One Master Mapper is a full time freelancer and ProFantasy mainstay – Ralf Schemmann; L Lee Saunders creates amazing add-ons, and other Master Mappers still contribute to the community.
We are reinstating the Master Mapper award. There is a backlog of worthy candidates, so expect to see us making up for lost time with a few select awards. This brings me to our Master Mapper, best known to the ProFantasy community as Joachim de Ravenbel, a name Jean-Michel Bravo took on a whim for RPG-related posts.
Jean-Michel is unusual even amongst Master Mappers for the breadth of his talent. He creates maps, writes macros, develops map-making techniques, supports the forum community, and has even programmed an XP – the CC3 name for add-ons.
There is a podcast interview with Ralf here with GMS Magazine – 14:00 in. They discuss using CC3 to create the Dragon Rage boardgame map (articles here), Dioramas, Fractal Terrains 3 and the Annuals. He also mentions the Tome – and Remy Monsen is working on a new version of that for our updated software.
Fractal Terrains 3, the latest version of our world-building software is out now. It is even more robust, features an improved interface, increased speed and more export features.
FT3 is designed to create entire worlds from scratch, starting with a flat sphere or real world data, but it’s with its random world creation that FT3 comes into its own. You can change colour, lighting and random settings, and choose physical parameters such as the size of your world, then just scan through the effectively infinite possibilities until you get one you like.
My main use for Fractal Terrains, aside from creating entire worlds for Ashen Stars, is to pick out islands, with rivers, to import into my own campaign world. It really does feel like your are exploring when you seek out the perfect world or landmass, though of course you can use the editing tools to shave off continents, flatten mountains and fill in depressions. The most megalomaniac-friendly command though, is Planetary Bombartment – the ability to crater your world with asteroids.
We’ve just released the October Annual for subscribers to download: A beautiful map style inspired by classic fiction treasure maps. It allows users to easily create handouts for their game and set their players on the trail of that elusive treasure hoard.
Due to after-GenCon demands and vacation times, we didn’t get around to posting about the September Annual when it was released. Here is sneak peek at the military operations type maps that can be created with its included style.
The RPG maps blog has been going for over a year now, and while some articles were topical, most have long term value, so here is a summary of those articles with links. Also, if you want to try your hand at some CC3 programming and scripting, check out the development blog.
Eight months ago I took the digital plunge into a brave new world called “YouTube” and released my very first video tutorial explaining the how to integrate maps created in CC3 and DD3 into RPTools MapTools. Since that time, and after careful reflection, I have come to the determination that the video really does look like something someone does for a first project. Still the advice is sound, and I wish to expand on concept.
In the video I used a PNG, which is a lossless compressed format, but not the best tool for streaming images across the internet. For that you should use JPEG.
Now we are talking about JPEG, if your file sizes are still too large (and I mean over 150K) export your image without a background. You will see an instant reduction in the file size as the computer discards all of that white space in the compression.
Use tiles! Wait not, not the stuff in the bathroom, well, kinda .. ok it’s close. If you want to sacrifice a little artistic direction, you can make tiles by photographing common materials (such as floorboards, walls, doors, furniture, etc) and build your own dungeon like you would assemble a puzzle. This will require a photo editing program such as Photoshop, or Paint .Net, but when you’re done you end up with a dozen tiny files that are repeated to make up a larger picture. The theory is sense these images are duplicated, the user only has to download a three 64×64 squares instead of a 4000×4000 image to cover the same ballroom floor. MapTools allow snapping, for ease of building, along with rotation tools to spin the images and scale tools to change the size.
Comments Off on Using ProFantasy’s Software with RPTools MapTools
Mark has been putting a lot of work into improving our users’ experience on the website. We wanted to make things easier to register, to find things, and let you download all your software there, not just upgrades and patches. We also added rewards and offers, and made tech support easier and quicker. Log in here to see more. If you have any problems, let us know.
Here is what’s on offer.
The new tabbed layout makes it easy to find what you need
You can register for the first time from any order page, or add an new order to your registration at the click of a button
You can see exclusive offers for registered users only
You can download all your registered products, even if they are 10 years old
You can earn vouchers or cold, hard cash (paypal, actually) through our rewards scheme, with instant totals
Support is streamlined, with the most common issues covered, a knowledge base and easy access to personal email support if you need it
First a warning – The .FCW file format is BINARY! If you do not feel comfortable playing with bits and bytes, this may not be for you. But if you do enjoy this type of challenge, the .FCW file format is one of the best ways to output to CC3. Imagine you have a random maze generator and you want to output it to CC3. You could export a script. It would redraw your maze one line at a time. But there are also some problems with scripts:
You have to run them. This may sound obvious but consider that you have to either know the text command to open and run a script file, or you need to know where in the menu system it is.
Scripts are slow. CC3 will have to take your script and run it line-by-line. Its as if you had set down and typed in the commands directly into CC3.
Scripts are not exactly fragile, but they are not very robust either. And, if your script fails, your users are the ones that are going to get frustrated.
Where as if you exported a .FCW file, simply the action of opening the file is all that is needed. So … if you are still with me, here we go!
One last twist – the .FCW file could be compressed.
The .FCW file format is made up of many different “Blocks” of data. The first 4 bytes of each block (except for the first block) contains the number of bytes that the following block contains. It starts with the FileID block. The FileID block is the only block that is guaranteed to be uncompressed. This 128 byte block contains quite a bit of general info on the file. It identifies what type of file it is to other programs, and the version and sub-version number of the file format is was built with. Last, but not least, it informs the reader that bytes after byte 128 are compressed or not. (To save an uncompressed file, after you have clicked “Save As …”, you will be presented with the save file dialog. If you click on the options button, you will be presented with a small dialog box. Uncheck the “File Compression” option)
For this first blog post on the .FCW file format, I will show you how to read a binary file into a byte array and how to display it, byte-by-byte in a textbox similar to all the binary editors display it. Being able to look inside a binary file will come in very handy in the future. Last but not least I will show you FILEID object.
Code Snippet – How to read an entire file into a byte array
Once the file is read into a byte array, I pull the first 128 bytes out of the file byte array, using an extension method to Arrays to create sub-arrays.
Code Snippet – SubArray extension method
publicstaticclassExtensions
{
publicstatic T[] SubArray<T>(this T[] data, int index, int length)
{
var result = new T[length];
Array.Copy(data, index, result, 0, length);
return result;
}
}
Then I feed the sub-array to my FILEID object. This object converts the bytes into the fields of the FILEID object. We can then check the Compressed property. If the file is compressed, the rest of the data is meaningless, so if the file is compressed, I set the background color of the textbox to a Rose color.
In 1998 we instituted the coveted Master Mapper award for excellence in cartography. You can see the hall of fame here. One Master Mapper is a full time freelancer and ProFantasy mainstay – Ralf Schemmann; L Lee Saunders creates amazing add-ons, and other Master Mappers still contribute to the community.
Fractal Terrains 3, the latest version of our world-building software is out now. It is even more robust, features an improved interface, increased speed and more export features.
