One nice thing you can do with CC3+ maps is to have multiple views embedded in one map. For example, in the Forest Trail annual style, you can choose if you want to see the treetops, like you would normally see a location in a forest if viewed from above, or if you want to hide the canopies so you can see what actually goes on under the trees, quite important for a battle map.

There are also cases where you want to make a map with private information for the gamemaster, and a public version of the map for the players.

Or maybe you need an overland map with a lot of information, perhaps showing both political information, economical information and climate information, but showing it all at the same time looks pretty messy.

Of course, if you have used CC3+ even just a little bit, you know that I am talking about hiding and showing sheets here. For the overland map, you can have one sheet with a political overlay, one with economic information, and one with a climate overlay, and only show the desired sheet, simple enough. For your GM’s secrets, just put them on a sheet by themselves that you hide when you export the player map.

But, what if your view requires switching on and off multiple sheets? Due to different effects, that political overlay may actually consist of one sheet with political borders, one sheet with the text associated with the information, and maybe another sheet with symbols related to this overlay. Once you have multiple sheets involved, it can get a bit harder to turn on/off the right sheets for any given occasion, which is what we’ll have a short look at today.

The first step is obviously to have a map that can benefit from hiding/showing sheets, basically there are two main scenarios here, first one is you have a single feature that can be turned on/off to provide a different view, like turning off the canopies in the forest map to see the ground below, and the second scenario is where you have different sets of information, like in my overland example where you either want to show the political info or the economical info, or the climate info. But both cases are really based on the same concept, hiding and showing sheets. The main difference is that in the first case, there is often a single sheet that can be toggled on/off, while in the second case you need to hide one set of sheets while simultaneously unhide another set of sheets to avoid conflicting sheets being shown simultaneously.

Of course, you can always do the manual approach, enter the sheets and effects dialog and hide and show what you need. It is not that hard, but can be tiresome if you do it often, and you have to remember all the sheets you need to work with. It is better to use some simple commands, which can be added to a macro if you wish. Or, if you don’t want to use commands, you can also make your life much easier by properly using layers.

Show/Hide by Filter

CC3+ has a set of commands that can easily show/hide sheets based on their names. For example, you can easily hide all the sheets that contain the word CLIMATE and show all the sheets that contain the word ECONOMIC. This means that if you have named your sheets to go along with your map views, it is extremely simple to toggle the required sheets for any view no matter how many sheets are involved and where they happen to be in the sheet order.

So, if I stick to my example above with an overland map with three views, political, economical and climate, then all I have to do is make sure all sheets involved in each view has the right keyword in their sheet names, for example, all the sheets for the political view should have the word POLITICAL in their sheet name somewhere. And just to make it easier for myself to handle any number of view, I also make sure that every single sheet that is involved in one of these views have the word VIEW in them as well. Now, I can just issue these two commands (by typing them on the command line or including them in a macro/hotspot) to instantly switch to the political view

HIDESHTF VIEW
SHOWSHTF POLITICAL

The first line simply hides all the VIEW sheets, while the second line shows all the political sheets, easy as that.

Now, there are three commands worth noting here, HIDESHTF which hide all sheets matching the provided filter word, SHOWSHTF which shows all sheets matching the filter, and TOGLSHTF which toggles the sheets matching the filter, i.e. hiding it if it was unhidden, an unhiding it if it was hidden. Toggling can be nice if you only have two views since you can swap between them with one command, but it is a bit vulnerable to user error, i.e. what if someone manually hid one of the sheets in one of the sets but not the others? In that case, toggling will just go back and forth, never going back to the correct state, while the two-command version presented above will always work and will fix such user “errors”.

For those interested, the F at the end of all these commands stands for “Filter”, which means they look for partial matches in the sheet names. There are equivalent commands just without that F at the end, these require a full and exact sheet name. These can be preferable if you just need to manipulate a single sheet, as the filter version can manipulate more sheets than desired if you are not careful about your naming, but generally I prefer the “F” versions.

Using Layers

A much ignored feature in CC3+ is layers. Layers were part of the software from the very first version, and were used to group entities into logical groups, but fell a bit out of use when Sheets where introduced since sheets offered features layers didn’t, like entity ordering. But layers are still highly useful, especially for things like this. For example, instead of using different sheets for your political text, economic text and climate text, you can just keep it all on the same sheet, but instead apply the appropriate layer to each text entry based on which view it belongs to (Or you can still keep them on different sheets, but also apply layers to them.)

This makes hiding/showing easier, especially if you do it manually, since you can apply the same layer to all the entities of a given view, even if they cross multiple sheets. Applying a layer also doesn’t change the look of the map in any way, as it is just a logical grouping. So you can have all the entities engaged in the political view on the POLITICAL layer, regardless of their sheet. Now, that means if you have 3 views like in our example, you may have lots of sheets involved, but it will only ever be three layers, POLITICAL, CLIMATE and ECONOMICAL. Thus, it is very easy to just hide the two layers you don’t need and show the third, all without worrying about the sheet at all. This means that even if you don’t want to use commands, you’ve made switching views much simpler on yourself. And adding entities to layers is pretty simple. Start by hiding ALL sheets except those belonging to the view you wish to configure. Now, since you only see the relevant entities, you can easily use change properties on them all at once and change their layer. Repeat for the next set of sheets. Obviously, if you wish to have entities from multiple views on the same sheet, you need to be a bit more careful when setting layers since you cannot do the select all approach.

Of course, there are also commands for handling layers, HIDEF, SHOWF and TOGLF, matching their sheet equivalents. So if you wish to do the same as I did with sheets, you could name your layers withe the VIEW keyword in them, i.e POLITICAL VIEW, CLIMATE VIEW and ECONOMICAL VIEW, and you can then do

HIDEF VIEW
SHOWF POLITICAL

Should you use Sheets or Layers

This is really up to you, but using layers means a bit more freedom with how you use your sheets. But then again, the only freedom you give up if you use the sheets for this is that you need individual sheets for features from different views (one TEXT sheet for each view for example) and you need to name them appropriately, but neither of this is particularly difficult. I kind of like using layers because they are designed to represent groupings, which is what our views are, but in the end, use whatever you prefer.

An Example

There are many maps in the community atlas that use different views. For example, have a look at Ellenge Town by Wyvern. Just hit the fcw button on the page to download the map file. Notice how this map has 3 available views in the navigation bar, Default, Secret Underground, and Secret Underground Only. Each of these entries in the navigation bar is backed by a hotspot, for example the Default one has these commands:

HIDESHT TUNNELS BACKGROUND (S)
HIDE SUBTERRANEAN

This particular map is not using the filter version of the command, but you can actually see here that it works on both sheets and layers. It hides one sheet and one layer. This just shows that this too is a fully valid way of doing it, and in this case a layer is used instead of a sheet filter to affect several sheets.

You can inspect the hotspots in the map by first unfreezing (thawing) the MAP LINKS layer, then go to View -> Show hyperlinks, and finally you can then use the Numeric Edit command to see the contents of the hotspots.

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.