We’ve released the April issue of the current Annual. The included floorplan style is inspired by the maps in vintage (1930s) Baedeker travel guides – just perfect for your pulp or horror games .
National Gallery Berlin done in CC3
A long wait is finally over. We’ve got the Cosmographer 3 materials from the printer and Steve has been building stock and assembling shipments since Friday. Look for your Cosmographer 3 box in the mail soon.
As many of you know I’ve been heads down working on “Map Invoker”, a map auto generator, for awhile. In its first (hopefully of many) incarnation it generates random towns/cities.
One of the first hurdles was to somehow create an algorithm to create a realistic shape for a city and its walls. Well, the resulting algorithm created three circles. One fixed in the center of the map and two that had their centers randomly placed within the first circle.
Fine, I check marked that as done and went on to the next challenge.
Well, now I’m in parameterizing mode where I am pulling out all the hard coded numbers and placing them at the disposal of the user, and that lead me back to the Wall algorithm. Why just limit it to two circles? Why not five, or eight? Why not start with a square or turn the additional circles into squares – or a random mix of both?
With the right settings, all these parameters can create so cities that look amazingly natural. With the wrong settings you can create a city that … just looks weird. But, that is the purpose of allowing the users to tweak these parameters, is it not? Nobody wants a cookie-cutter city generator. If anyone is going to want to use a city generator, they want to be able to create a one-of-a-kind city that is all their own.
Then it’s just a matter of trying to name these parameters so that the user has an inkling of what they control. For the circle/square/mixed parameter – a slider, one side all circles, the other all squares and in the middle a mixture. What to call it? Wall Squareness? Wall Sharpness? Wall Roundness? Hmmm…
Hopefully no matter what the parameters are named, users will be able to deduce its effect.
Well, it looks like I’ve gotten most of the Wall generation parameterized. Here is an image of a large city (2000′ x 1600′ Template) with some of the “interesting” settings.
A large city generated by 'Map Invoker'
We were very happy, when fantasy cartographer Jon Roberts agreed to do a Annual style for us late last year. Jon’s work is nothing but remarkable and has appeared in a wide range of gaming publications.
His overland style is now available as the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2011 and can be downloaded by current subscribers.
Take a look at the example map included with the March issue:
Jon Roberts Style Example Map
Another Perspectives 3 preview. The excellent Kai-Uwe Allner is creating the 3D symbols. In Perspectives Pro, we offer four symbol angles, in Per 3, it will be eight. You can me tabbing through the different angles in the clip.
In answer to comments in the previous thread:
Yes, we’ll have wall textures. We haven’t decided how to do wall shading.
Our plan is to have flat doors but with “indent” symbols to give them depth. The advantage of flat symbols is that they can align to walls at any angle. We might do 3D ones limited to fixed directions though. We still have to decide.
We weren’t sure if Perspectives would make it through to version 3, but with this proof of concept, I think it’s clear it’s worthwhile. More detail in another post.
More Dungeon Symbols
Well of Elemental Water
The February issue of the Annual 2011 is now available. It provides a huge selection of dungeon and battlemap symbols for use in DD3. The number of individual symbols comes to a staggering 1500 – making the download larger than most of our full products. Community member Joachim de Ravenbel created the objects in Pov-ray and exported their top-down view as high-resolution bitmaps. We took those, created CC3 symbols from them and sorted them into catalogs for easy in use in CC3/DD3.
I’m very happy to report that Joseph Sweeney has taken to Cosmographer 3 like an angry Rancor to Jabba’s fighting pit and produced his first video tutorials for our sci-fi add-on. Continue reading »
Note: This is a cross post. The original is posted @ The CC3 Developer Blog
Wow, its been a while since I’ve written a post here. The holidays are always a busy family blur. Well, here is the latest installment …
The path/poly element is the most used element in CC3. You really cannot get much done with it. Try building anything in CC3 without it (Sure you can just use more primitive elements and use multipoly & group for joining and filling, but really you are just re-creating the path/poly element). So if you want to get something done in an XP, odds are you are going to be working with paths/polys.
Here is the follow-up to our poll asking which additional Traveller starship deckplans we should do. I was a bit surprised that warships seemed to be the top choices (except for the far trader). I’d have thought that civilian ships would be more important to most Traveller players.
Nevertheless we created deckplans for the three most popular designs:
- The Lucifer-class Destroyer Escort
- The Empress Marava-class Far Trader
- The Zhdits-class Zhodanie Destroyer Escort
