A new update for Campaign Cartographer 3+ is now available. We’ve done a lot of internal work (small bug fixes and improvements), but also improved some user interface issues and added a convenient new feature.

User Interface

Bitmap fill styles will now be displayed in a much larger format in any of the dialogs. That makes it much easier to recognize or judge one of the many detailed bitmap fills available in the template you are working on.

New Command

Have you ever wanted to enlarge or shrink the area of the map you’ve been working on? The new “Resize Drawing Area” command (available from the File menu) will now make this much easier and quicker. Just type in the new map dimensions, and the map border and background will scale to the new size, without affecting any of the content you’ve already drawn. From there you can add new content and enlarge the existing features with the help of the editing tools.

You can download the update from your registration page. It is available among the CC3+ files on the Downloads tab.

Version Notes

Here are the version notes for Update 18:

CC3+ Version 3.87
=================
– Added SCALEMAPEXT and SCALEMAPEXTM commands to scale map template things (MAP BORDER, BACKGROUND, and SCREEN).
– Added TOGL and TOGLF commands to toggle visibility of a specified layer.
– Added JPEGOPT, DWGOPT, EMFOPT, and FCWOPT commands to allow direct access to save options for the major file types.
– Added SYMPTFILTER command to support point filtering on symbol import. This change may reduce artifacts for some kinds of symbol creation.
– Added LISTCMDS command to list all of the available commands in the system (main program and XPs).
– Changed internal image representation to allow for more efficient imaging operations.
– Removed some unused legacy DLLs to reduce disk footprint.
– ZOOMSEL command should work better than it used to.
– Fixed crash with hotspots in symbols when the layer for the symbol reference is hidden.
– Fixed XML parser usage to properly serialize boolean values.
– Fixed rename problem with sheets that could cause effects to be added to the wrong sheet.
– Fixed out of memory error that could happen with certain drawings.
– Fixed memory corruption that could occur when reading an invalid drawing tool file.
– Fixed memory corruption and possible crash when dropping text longer than 4090 characters.
– Now visibly rejects attempts to drop unknown file types onto a drawing.
– Dropping a picture onto a drawing while holding down the Shift key now allows rotating and scaling the image.
– Dropping a picture onto a drawing from a browser no longer generates an old-style image entity.
– Widened the drop portion of fill style preview combo boxes to make it easier to read style names.
– Updated PNG loaders to improve protection against certain malformed image files.
– Built with Visual Studio 2017. Some code elements should be a bit faster.
– MenuConfig utility now offers better support for special path characters (#$@) in file names.
– Options button on Save As will respond better on higher-dpi displays.
– Floating prompt now displays better on higher-dpi displays (has a different visual appearance as well).
– Traveller sector importer now handles the new-style Traveller 5 sector file format.

Here is another set of awesome user-created maps that caught our eyes this last month. As always, selected by the elaborate and top secret processes of ProFantasy’s evaluation method (summed up as “Hey, that’s cool!”). Share your own on the Profantasy community forum or the Facebook user group.

The border outpost of Tarkas is Texas Jake‘s first village/town/city map created with CC3+ and it looks wonderful, not least to the great background texture that he created himself.

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We were sent this wonderful little pirate treasure map via Facebook by CC3+ user Marilyn Velez, together with the following delightful story – fit for Halloween. This was just so nice a gesture, we had to share it with the community:

‘Tis The Great Isle of The Northern Seas, otherwise known as Missing Bone Island. Legend says, if you stare long enough at its reflection, a great beast with ripping jaws, and no eyes, stares back at ya, and you’re never heard from again, much like Davy Jones’ Locker, except this beast drew pirates to their death, but if lucky, a great treasure is to be had. Yes. That’s right, a treasure, indeed, but not just any treasure. The treasure of the worlds’ most notorious pirate, Bearded Jack, and if lucky, you’ll even find yourself some Grog and Clap of Thunder to drink along the way, but don’t go gettin three sheets to the wind on me now, and if you see him, blow the man down! Keelhaul and cleave him to the brisket! Oh, what’s that? why you ask?

However, the tales didn’t cease there matey. They say Bearded Jack not only killed his men, but impaled them by the Olde Salt Point so that their haunting stares would cause great fright, and cease anyone from entering or nearing the shores. They claim he scattered his treasure throughout the island, burying it deep beneath, where no one would find it; not even the best of hunters. However, as the years passed, sailors say coins resurfaced containing the stain of Bearded Jack, some, even had his face. Till this day, they claim all who gape long enough into his eyes are visited by his spirit.

Thank you, Marilyn!

P.S.: Do you have maps you want to share and perhaps see featured on the blog? Come over to the Campaign Cartographer Facebook community, or the ProFantasy community forum, and you’ll find a superbly friendly user community.

This week is Spiel time, i.e. the world’s biggest boardgame consumer fair takes place in Essen, Germany. ProFantasy has been exhibiting there since at least 2000 and it is always great fun, if also a busy and tiring time.

For this year, the organizer (Merz Verlag) has vastly improved the available documentation and guides. The “Spiel Guide” is an actually useful piece with the hall plans and all exhibitors listed alphabetically by hall. Hopefully that should make it easy to find our booth 6G113, which is smack in the middle of hall 6. If you are looking for board games, it also contains a list of all the new games announced for Spiel.

Yours truly (Ralf) will be there and I’ll be happy to demo you any of the software, give you a glimpse at the upcoming Token Treasure and Cities of Schley, or just chat about maps, map-making and gaming in general. Hope to see you there!

CC3+ comes with a bunch of fills, and with the official and un-official add-ons out there, you have a large amount of different fills available to you. But no matter how many fills you have, you always find yourself needing something you don’t have (or is that just me?).

In this article, we’ll take a look at some ways to get more out of your existing fills. We’ll look at using effects, layering fills, and manipulating fill scale, all in the name of producing more variety for our maps.

Note that all the techniques here uses the resources already in the map, which means you can still share your map file with others without them getting red X’es due to custom fills.

All images in this article are clickable to see larger versions. This is recommended to see the details properly.

Changing Colors

Both the ‘Adjust Hue/Saturation’ and ‘RGB Matrix Process’ effects are capable of changing the color of a fill style. You can utilize these effects to change the colors to achieve different goals. For example, you can use them to make subtly different shades of grass to break monotony, or you can use them to completely change the color of the grass, for example to make it look more brownish and dried up.

The image below shows how I’ve used the RGB Matrix Process effect to make an autumn version and a dried-up version of the standard Mike Schley style farmlands. A little color change goes a long way to provide a completely different visual look.

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The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2018 is now available and treads new paths for us. For the first time we’ve produced an hour-long tutorial ourselves to show you how to create an overland map from start to finish, using the Mike Schley Overland style. Also included is the detailed tutorial made we created in the video.

As this is a first for us we are very much interested in your feedback. Is the presentation at 1080px (make sure to use full-screen) okay? Do you need more detail for the commands used? Would rather see long tutorials like this, or shorter pieces explaining individual commands?

You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. If you are already subscribed, the October issue is now available for download on your registration page.

We skipped a month in August, so I had to look through even more awesome maps to present you for September! As always the selection is very hard and I’m not generally choosing by “best” or “most artistic criteria”, but simply by what catches my eye. It may be a great first map, an idea I’ve never seen before or anything else really. Enjoy!

Danel Yeaman created this dockside building and shared in the Facebook community. I love the simple little ship docked there at the Old Fishery!

Continue reading »

Welcome to the September newsletter. Here in the northern hemisphere the summer is drawing to a close and we are preparing for the second big convention of the year (Spiel in Germany) and busy autumn season.

News

• Find out what’s on the Cartographer’s Desk and what progress we are making on our next releases.
• Check out the August and September Annual issues.

Resources

• We’ve released a mini add-on for City Designer 3: The Celtic Village symbols by Scott Aniolowski.
• Remy takes a look at map notes in CC3+ drawings and what uses they have.
• The question of how to take a section of a regional map and create a local map from it pops up quite regularly on the forum and Remy gives you a more detailed answer than the CC3+ manual can.
• We present another small selection of user maps in August and September’s Map of the Month highlights.

Articles

• Joe Sweeney takes a stab at creating custom textures – and tiling ones at that – for CC3+ and presents his new repository for these.
• Josh Plunkett presents the Realmworks project for the CC3+ Community Atlas.
• Antonios S. reviews Dioramas 3, Perspectives 3 and the Annual Vol 11 on RPGNet.

Let’s take another look at the two products we are working on at the moment: The Token Treasury and the new symbol set by Mike Schley.

Token Treasury

For the token treasury, Rich Longmore keeps sending over his finished monster portraits for approval, and it’s a rare piece that we have to ask him a few adjustments for. For example see the Barghest here. The original version (left) looks great – but it felt a little too natural for, a wolverine came to my mind instead of a supernatural monster. So I asked Rich to make the face a little more unnatural (bony face, fiery eyes) and he produced the second version (right) in no time at all.

We’ve also decided to make the tokens available in round AND square formats, so Rich had to go back and add a little bits and pieces to existing ones here and there, but that’s all finished now and we are chugging along nicely. I am converting the artwork into symbols as we go along, which should make producing the final products once all graphics are done fairly straightforward.

Cities of Schley

I know you are all eagerly waiting for the new Symbol Set “Cities of Schley” by Mike. You’ll be happy to hear that Mike has finished all the ink outlines of the buildings and is now working on the coloring. You can see just a tiny section of his preview here. To get an idea how detailed his work is just let me tell you that the original of this graphic is 9000 pixel across!

Once I get the colored versions, I will start adding the roof shading to the symbols so they will work with the automated lighting just as the other CD3 symbols.

Scott created this wonderful little symbol catalog of celtic dwellings which fits perfectly in with the symbols of City Designer 3, so we decided to make it available as a mini-add on. The download is available from your registration page if you have City Designer 3 registered. Here is Scott’s introduction to the catalog:

The Celtic symbol set started quite by accident. I was building a set of texture fills in Genetica and decided to include a thatch. That was achieved by layering dried grass patterns in Genetica and then using GIMP to hand-drawn in individual strands before finishing it back in Genetica by softening and blurring the image and making it seamlessly tileable. Once finished, I wanted to test it out on a typical round Celtic house and was mostly pleased with the way it looked. That just happened to coincide with something I was reading about the Iron Age, so I delved deeper into the details of Celtic villages. The variety of building styles intrigued me. While the majority of the structures were round, they did raise the more traditional square buildings, as well, for barns and storehouses and eventually as houses.

The map was made in CD3, Bitmap A style, with a few fills imported from the Overland catalog. It is just a quick example. I’m very excited that ProFantasy deemed my little collection of symbols worthy enough to offer to CC3+ users, and hope people enjoy and can use them. Besides thanks to the ProFantasy staff, a thanks needs to go out to mapping maestra, Sue Daniels, who was instrumental in helping me get the symbols to their final finished stage!