In CC3+, drawing tools are great timesavers. The basic functionality of a drawing tool is that it works as a preset that contains all the various settings required, such as line style, fill style, line width, color, sheet and layer so that when you draw using a drawing tool you don’t have to go around setting all of these manually like we did in the good old days. Drawing tools also have some built-in nice features like being able to draw two separate entities at once, being able to stay within the map border, and the option to easily edit an existing shape.

However, there is another very important feature that exists for drawing tools, and that is to attach macros to them. A drawing tool can contain an embedded macro which follow the tool and isn’t dependent on your main CC3+ macro file and can contain macros that work in tandem with what you draw using the tool, or even functionality that isn’t connected to drawing at all. Today, we’ll look at how to create these tools and have a brief look at how they can make things easier for us.

Drawing with Macros

If you have been making overland maps, you’ll probably familiar with the forest drawing tools. If you pay attention when you use them, you’ll note that they ask you to draw a smooth shape, and then fills this shape with trees after you are done drawing it. This is a macro drawing tool at work. What happens is that the tool itself is only set up to draw that forest background, but it also contain a macro that gets called when you are done drawing that calls the Fill With Symbols command to fill the area you just drew with trees. Let us make a similar macro that uses the Symbols in Area command instead. I won’t go into detail about Symbols in Area here, since this is about making a macro tool that uses the command, rather than explain the command itself, but if you need a refresher for the command, you can look at this article.

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Welcome to the February newsletter! Apart from an update to Fractal Terrains and a new column by Remy Monsen, we have two cartography articles from our Annual contributors – a feature we will continue in future months.

News

• A new version of Fractal Terrains 3 is available: 3.0.21 which improves the Finding Rivers function, ensuring they always appear. You can download an update from your registration page.
• The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2018 is available. The symbol pack Dungeon Walls allows you to create detailed and varied walls for your underground complexes.
• The January issue of the Annual 2018 offered a hex-version of Mike Schley’s overland style from CC3+.
• The Community Mapping Project is running a mapping competition. Anyone submitting a map to the project in February participates, so there is still time.

Resources

Articles

• Christina Trani describes her process for creating the battle-maps for March’s Annual issue The Curse of the Lich-king.
• Sue Daniel shows how to use GIMP to create parchment textures for use in CC3+.

Annuals for CC3+

We are happy to announce that three more Cartographer’s Annuals are now compatible with CC3+: Thanks to the hard work of Jeff Salus, if you have previously purchased one of them, you can now freely download Volume 7, Volume 6 and Volume 5 from your registration page. Be sure you use the “Setup for CC3+” to install them properly with the current version of Campaign Cartographer.

If you don’t own them yet, purchasing them from the web store will give you both the CC3 and CC3+ versions. Highlights of the three Annuals include the complete set of John Robert’s drawing styles: Overland, Dungeon and City.

You will also be pleased to hear that we are well underway for the next two Annuals (working backwards) to become available for CC3+. Look for Volume 4 and Volume 3 in the next few weeks.

CC3+ Update 10

To support the current and upcoming Annuals for CC3+ we have also released a new update for CC3+: Update 10 (version 3.76). Here is the change log from the Readme file for Update 10:

CC3+ Version 3.76
=================
– added Copy & Paste for sheet effects in Sheets & Effects dialog
– added preview in all fill style and line style selection boxes
– added status preview for layers and sheets in selection boxes
– added commands to control display of fill style types in style selection: FSCOMBOMASK (normal command) and FSCOMBOMASKM (macro version)
– added support for Annual Vol 6 and Vol 5
– added SHADEP command to draw shaded polygons will all possible options
– fixed CUTMENUON command
– fixed CD3 symbols to use @ bitmap link reference
– fixed CD3 house settings to include frills
– fixed importing symbols with @ links and _map references
– various fixes related to shaded polygons
– fixed editing macros from drawing tools
– fixed CC3B forest fill setting
– updated ImageMagick’s convert.exe to newest version
– updated CA Pro templates in CA3

As you can see it contains some other neat features. Especially the ability to copy and paste effects between different sheets can speed up work considerably when you are setting up your own effect settings. And the ability to see a sample of the fill styles when you are choosing one in any dialog box is also very handy.

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.

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A common way to label maps is to place a number next to an important feature (building, room, prominent location, trap, etc). The advantage to just using a simple number is that it takes less space in the map, making it look less cluttered, something that is very helpful if you need lots of labels in a small space. Number labels also doesn’t betray any information by themselves, so it can be used on dungeon rooms without players knowing their meaning just from seeing the map.

These markers can of course be placed using the regular text commands, but one very easy way that are often overlooked is to use the Number Label command found in CC3+. This command is designed to make it extremely simple to quickly place multiple labels with automatically incrementing numbers.

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Last month, I had a look at how to embed notes into your map, and make clickable links to show these. Such notes are great, since they are embedded into the map and thus part of the map file itself. But they also have their downsides, one of them being that they only support plain text. What if you want rich formatted text, maybe with some images?

Well, we can’t embed that into the map, but we can make the same kind of clickable hotspots that can link to either websites or external files. The notes are no longer part of the map, but they can easily be accessed from it.

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Mike Schley created a new set of dungeon symbols for the free monthly content and your pleasure. Take a seat on one of these symbols to feel like royalty, but beware, the throne might crumble beneath you and dump you unceremoniously on the floor! The April symbol pack “Royal Seating” contains 20 new symbols for the Dungeons of Schley style, and provides a range of sumptuous thrones to seat that royalty – or show its decline and fall with the destroyed versions.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 4 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS4 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley is available for purchase here.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to April 2025) is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.

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.  Continue reading »

Everyone loves a pretty map, even me. But there is also more to maps than their visual appeal, it is the information they convey. An aerial photo of your hometown may tell you exactly how it looks visually and how it is laid out, but it provides very little information about what can be found where in the town. And this is what separates a map from a photo, the additional information it contains that explains what we see in the map.

Today I’ll look into a feature from City Designer – City Demographics. City Demographics in CD3 is a coloring system that lets you color buildings by function (for example residential, commerce, accommodation). This is also a toggle feature which means you can show a nice pretty map for illustrative purposes, and when you need demographics, you can simply turn it on temporarily. Continue reading »

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.

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