ProFantasy Software has released 31 map-making products for PC. For about half of our users our flagship Campaign Cartographer 3+ is all they need to create their maps. But our add-ons give you powerful new tools and symbols to create maps in a huge variety of styles and genres and offer you hundreds of pre-made maps you can use in your campaign.

There are lots of curated bundles which include groups of products at a discount. But this article is about the Big Kahuna, the Full Monty, the Whole Shebang – our bundle of everything single thing we produce

It provides great value at a discount of more than 45% on the RRP of all the constituent products, but its price point means it’s not for everyone.

The Whole Shebang includes 31 products, featuring more than 80,000 symbols, in 163 styles and hundreds of maps across genres including fantasy, SF, modern and historical. It can create character portraits, overland maps, dungeons, floorplans. cities, villages and 3D cutaway maps. It has maps of real word castles, temples and cities. Any map you see on our website or social media, and almost all maps created by are users are made exlusively with these products.

You can use the vast library of high-res art assets in other programs such as Photoshop, too, all covered by our license.

You can get the Whole Shebang here.

We’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about this bundle – email ralf@profantasy.com for more information.

The July Annual is now ready for download and installation from the registration page, if you have subscribed to it.

This month Pär Lindström gives us a new style – “Renaissance City” – based on a renaissance-era city map of Paris. Creating the example map for the style was very easy and straightforward and we think you’ll find it equally satisfying to use. Thanks Pär, for another great style!

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the July issue is available for download on your registration page now.

Welcome dear cartographers, to the June newsletter! Now that half of the year is over, GenCon looms on the horizon.

News

• • The June Annual with Jean-Michel Bravo’s “Ancient Tombs” style pack has been available for download since the start of the month.

Resources

• • Use the Symbols in Area command (SYMFILL) to create drawing tools for scattered woods (as opposed to dense forests).
  • We have a new selection of Maps of the Month for June.

Articles

• Remy Monsen looks at “Entity Basics” in his new article on developing plug-ins for Campaign Cartographer 3+.
• Ralf continues the series of articles on creating your own map styles, looking at editing fill styles and creating new ones.

This is part 2 of the “Creating a New Map Style” series of articles.

After we have decided on a style to create last month, let’s take a look at creating the first new pieces of artwork. One of the defining aspects of a style are fill styles it uses.

1. Creating new Bitmap Fills

Let’s take a look at the bitmap fills used in the World of Wonder style, which serves as the basis for our new style. Open the CC3+ program data folder in Windows Explorer: C:\ProgramData\ProFantasy\CC3Plus and find the subfolder /Bitmaps/Tiles/Overland/Annual Worlds of Wonder/. You’ll see that it includes 9 different fills, with at four different resolutions each.

Create a new folder under /Bitmaps/Tiles/Overland/ called “Annual Worlds of Wonder BW”, then copy the VH resolution file of each fill over to the new folder. Remove the _VH part of all the file names. Now you can open up the individual files in a Bitmap editor (like Photoshop or Gimp to edit the textures. I’m doing some very simply operations here, converting the files to greyscale to match our idea of a black and white stlye, and I rotate some of them and/or apply a photo filter. Of course you can be as elaborate as you want, even creating complete new graphics, but for the purpose of this tutorial I’ll keep it simple.

2. Importing the New Fills

Let’s get the new fills into our map template. TO do so, we need to start CC3+ and load our template /Templates/Overland Maps/Wizard/Annual Worlds of Wonder BW.FCT. The select Tools > Import bitmap fill styles from the menu.

The import bitmap fills dialog comes. “Browse” to our newly created source folder and select one of the files. Check the “Create other resolutions option and set “Scaled” to 1000.00 for both width and height. To differentiate the new bitmap fills from the old ones, change the “Suffix” to _BW (for our black and white style). Then click OK and let CC3+ do its work.

3. Changing the Existing Fills

There are only a few entities in the template that use the old (coloured) fill styles, but even if there were more, it is easy to change them:

• Right-click the Change Properties button and choose Change Fill Style.
• Right-click on the map to select, then choose More > Fill Style.
• Right-click to bring up the fill style dialog and choose “CA145_Parchment” from the Bitmap Files tab. Click Ok.
• Right-click and choose Do It.
• Right-click to bring up the fill style dialog again and choose “CA145_Parchment_BW”. Click Ok.

You’ll see that the parchment border of the map has turned grey. You can now do the same for each of the existing fill styles, but for this map you really only need to do it for the CA145_Ocean fill, as that is the fill of the background rectangle.

The template now shows a greyscale version of the old one and that’s how we wanted it to be. Next time we’ll start of converting the symbols of the style into the new look.

Dear map aficionados, it’s time again for our Maps of the Month series, where we highlight just a few of the many contributions to the online CC3+ community. Enjoy!

Christina Trani (Lorelei) posted pictures of her 3D ship plan in action on Facebook and the forum. Isn’t the combination of a flat floorplan with a 3D arrangement just wonderful?

Continue reading »

The Symbols in Area command was introduced in CC3+ long after most of the basic styles were created, meaning it is not used in those styles’ drawing tools. But since it is very useful for creating terrain features like scattered woodlands, why not set up some new tools to make use of it? In this little article I’ll take you through doing exactly that. As an example I’ll create a scattered deciduous woods for the Mike Schley overland style.

1. Setting up the Symbols In Area command

• First, load an existing or start a new Mike Schley overland and choose the Symbols in Area command from the Draw menu.
• Click Browse and load the Vegetation catalog from /Symbols/Maps/Mike Schley/
• Set the settings as shown in the screenshot on the right, then Save the setting under \System\Fillers\MS_WoodsDecid.symfill

If you want to test and possibly adjust the settings, draw a smooth polygon on the map and use the command on it after clicking OK in the Symbols in Area dialog.

2. Creating a new Drawing Tool

Now we need to set up the new drawing tool for this setting.

• Right-click the Terrain Drawing tools button and click the Advanced button.
• Select the tool Terrain Default, Forest Decid and click New.
• Name the new tool “Terrain Default, Woods Decid” and save it.
• Click Command to Execute and enter the following macro:

SYMFILLLOAD @system\fillers\MS_WoodsDecid.symfill
SELSAVE
SELBYP
SYMFILLM
SELREST

• Save the tool and you’re good to use it.

3. Creating a Drawing Tool Preview.

You’ll notice that the tool doesn’t have a preview at this point. That’s because a macro-using drawing tool needs a little FCW file (CC3+ map for the preview. Let’s create this as a bonus step – it’s not really necessary but useful.

• Load the foilowing FCW file in CC3+ from your Programdata folder (which might be different from the path show here): C:\ProgramData\Profanatsy\CC3Plus\System\Drawtools\Overland Mike Schley\Terrain Default, Forest Decid.FCW and save it in the same folder under the name Terrain Default, Woods Decid.FCW. This is the same file name as the drawing tool we created, only with a different file extension.
• Erase all trees from the file, but leave the gray background.
• Use the Symbols in Area command with the settings we’ve previously created, then Save the map.

And that’s all there is to creating a scattered woods drawing tool. You can do the same with pine or jungle trees, or any type of symbol you want. Here is an example created with the new drawing tool:

This is the second article in my series about XP development. To understand this article properly, you should be familiar with the contents of the previous articles.

In this article, we’ll talk about how we can manipulate our drawing. In CC3+, a drawing is really a series of entities, so we are going to have a closer look at what an entity really is, how to create new entities in the map, and how to access and manipulate existing entities.

Entities

Everything in a CC3+ map is an entity; a symbol, a line, a landmass and so on. This term should be well known to all CC3+ mappers, as it is the term used in official documentation. However, it isn’t just these visible things that are entities, almost everything stored in a CC3+ drawing is an entity, such as a map note or an effect. We can view an entity as a data container for one specific thing or aspect of our map.

When working on an XP, you are almost always going to be handling entities. After all, manipulating entities is needed no matter what you want to do with the drawing, including extracting information from it, so understanding how to work with these is very important.

Continue reading »

The June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now ready for download and installation. The style pack “Ancient Tombs” is a set of Egyptian-themed artwork including a huge number of new symbols and bitmap fills and comes with a complete mapping written by Jean-Michel himself. In fact this style is only the first of a trilogy, where the future part will look at creating isometric versions of the floorplans and a set of advanced techniques.

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the June issue is available for download on your registration page now.

Welcome cartographers to the May newsletter! We are busy with the travel preparations for the first convention of the year, but nevertheless have some goodies for you.

News

• ProFantasy will be exhibiting for the first time at UK Games Expo in Birmingham from May 31st to June 2nd.
• The May Annual with Sue Daniel’s “Beaumaris Castle” map pack has been available for download since the start of the month.
• What products are in the development queue? Find out where we stand with Cities of Schley and the second Token Set.

Resources

• We have a new selection of Maps of the Month for May.

Articles

• Remy Monsen explains the different options for units in the sheet effects settings.
• Ralf Schemmann starts a new series of articles on creating your own map styles, looking at basic considerations in the first installment.

I’m sure you all would like to know what is currently in development and when the next add-ons for CC3+ will arrive. Well, I can report that Cities of Schley is very close to completion now and that the next Token Treasury is chugging along nicely.

Cities of Schley

Mike has finished almost all the symbols for the set, and is now working on the bitmap textures that we need to go along with them, so the City Designer house tool can create matching buildings.

Sue Daniels has been helping us with creating the roof maps and as you can on the right, they look great. She’s also suggested a great way to give you more variety in the roof shapes without compromising the shadow’s on the city map (as mirroring a symbol within CC3+ would do).

Token Treasury 2

Seeing that there is still a vast army of fiends and critters lurking in the shadows to pounce on hapless heroes, we’ve decided to drag a few more into the light of the virtual tabletop.

Rich Longmore is creating another set of monster tokens and I’m always delighted when a new one charges through the doorway (or slithers through a crack in the wall).

We do have a few slots for new monster available in the list, so if you have something special that you would like to see as a token, let us know in the comments below!