Last month, I looked at how to add information to your city map by using demographic coloring. Today, let us see how we can add descriptions for map features, like a building, that can be shown with a click.

For example, this can be used to add a note to each house describing who lives here, or if it is a business, what they do, what they sell, opening hours, prices, and more.

The basic idea here is that we will use CC3+’s map notes to store the actual information, and then we will add a hotspot to the relevant buildings to make it clickable and display the text. There are several variants around this, like making the hotspot open up a webpage or hide/show text placed in the map itself, but let us stick with map notes for now. 

There are two parts to this procedure, creating the map note (and filling it with lore), and creating the hotspot. So let us start with the map note.

Before creating a map note, we should identify the feature on the map we wish to write a note for. In my case, I am using the Snowport map, and I am going to write a short map note describing the palace.

Map notes can be accessed by clicking the Map Notes button. When you first visit this dialog, you will most likely see that there are a couple of notes here already. These are used by CC3+ itself to keep certain information about your map, for example, the one called OnOpenMacro contains a macro that runs each time you open the map, and it is this macro that sets up the environment by showing the right toolbar for your map type, showing the right symbol catalog, and so on. For our task today, we’ll ignore these existing notes, and make our own, so let us just hit the New button. For the name, CC3+ allows regular characters, numbers and spaces. Many special characters will also be allowed, but I mostly stay away from special characters when I am going to throw that name into a macro later. For my example here, I’ll simply give it the name Palace and hit OK. This brings up the text editor where you can edit your note. Make sure to check the box that says multi-line and type/paste in your text (Max 8000 characters per note), and hit OK when done. If you need to add more map notes or edit the existing ones, simply visit the map note dialog again, select the desired note, and click edit.

Now, with our map note written, we can turn the palace into a hotspot. Before we do that, there is just one caveat with hotspots you need to remember. They are always rectangular. This can cause some issues if you are trying to add hotspots to a lot of buildings or other places of interests that are close by each other. For example, one of the spots in a map in the community atlas that needed hotspots was a circle cut into wedges like a cake. That does not work very well with CC3+’s rectangular hotspots. What I do in these cases is to make multiple smaller hotspots, almost like small puzzle pieces, after all, it rarely matters if it is one large hotspot covering an area, or multiple small ones leading to the same action. As long as tight quarters due to other hotspots isn’t a problem, I usually just make a hotspot large enough to encompass the entire point of interest, and don’t care too much if it also covers some nearby areas.

To create a hotspot, Just go to Tools -> Macros -> Make Hotspot. This will bring up the text editor editor again, this time to write the macro for our hotspot. The macro is very simple. Just leave the dialog in single-line mode, and add the text OPENNOTE Palace; and hit OK. Note that this is a macro, so syntax is important. You’ll obviously want to replace the word “Palace” with the name of your own note, but make sure there is only a single space between OPENNOTE and the name of the map note, and that there are no spaces before or after that semicolon. If the map note name contain spaces, they should obviously be included, but no extra spaces anywhere. After hitting OK, CC3+ will ask you to define the hotspot window (see the command line), this basically means defining two opposite corners of the rectangle, for example the top left and bottom right corner, so just click in the appropriate locations to place these, and the hotspot is done.

Note that immediately after placing a hotspot, all hotspots becomes visible in the map with the macro text written below them (and that text can be huge or tiny, depending on the active text settings when you placed the hotspot). You can easily hide these from the View Menu (Hide Hyperlinks), and in any case, they won’t show the next time you open the map.

And that’s all there is to it. You can now click the hotspot, and a text window will open showing your note. Note that since hotspots normally are hidden, you have to know about it to use it. The mouse cursor will turn into a hand when over a hotspot, but I don’t believe most people go moving their mouse over all ares of the map looking for hotspots. You can of course show them from the view menu, but a better option is often to add a regular polygon (filled or outline) to where the hotspot is to mark it. You can place these outlines on a sheet with various effects to control their appearance, allowing you to decide if you want just a subtle hint or fully obvious markers. A hotspot in itself is also just a normal entity, so if you want to get rid of it, just make sure to show hyperlinks from the view menu, then simply erase it or manipulate it using CC3+’s regular commands (Just don’t rotate it, it will stop working if you do).

If you have questions regarding the content of this article, please use the ProFantasy forums. It can take a long time before comments on the blog gets noticed, especially for older articles. The forums on the other hand, I frequent daily.