If you own a lot of ProFantasy products, or have installed one or more of the large community symbol packs, you will have a lot of symbols. By default, CC3+ will give you easy access to the symbols belonging to the current map style through the symbol catalog buttons immediately above the map window, but sometimes you may wish to search for other symbols not made for the current style, which may fit anyway. But how to best find these symbols? Let us check out a few ways which may be of assistance to you here.

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It is my pleasure to announce the Master Mapper of 2021, the yearly title we bestow on the most outstanding map-maker of the ProFantasy community. It is never been an easy choice, seeing all the wonderful maps created by our map-makers, but in the end we all agreed on a name for 2021: Hans Anders Bergström, or Lillhans as he is know on the forum. He created an insane amount of highly innovative and wonderful maps, inventing his very own technique of simulating water colors and hand-drawn lines in the process, astounding the whole community and us with what could be achieved with the tools at hand. We therefore name him the Master Mapper of 2021. Congratulations and thanks!

Hans Anders has been with us on the community forum since 2019, and the number of maps he has shared in that relatively short time is immense. With the Master Mapper title we want to specifically thank him for:

• Creating lots of highly innovative maps and shared his creation process with the community.
• Starting and participating in lively discussions, helping actively and contributing to the shared skill set in the Profantasy community.
• Coming up with new and unexpected ways to use Campaign Cartographer’s tools and freely sharing them with the other map-makers of the community.
• Contributed to the resources available for Campaign Cartographer via the Cartographer’s Annual.

So, thank you Anders, we are looking forward to all the future maps, styles and symbols you will come up with!

A few weeks ago, I hosted a live stream taking a closer look at the drawing tools. Making this the perfect time to talk a bit more about the more advanced aspects of the drawing tools and how to utilize them properly and explaining a few things in more detail than appropriate for a stream.

Examples of advanced use of drawing tools is to draw aligned fills, drawing a path and have symbols placed along it or drawing a polygon and having it filled with randomly placed symbols. Basically, a lot of the things you can do using multiple steps with regular CC3+ commands can be automated and streamlined by making a drawing tool for it.

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People who have browsed the Community Atlas website have probably noticed that you can search maps, not just by name, but also by text in the map. So, how to I manage to do that, the maps on the website is just images, right? Granted, there are tools available that tries to understand text in images, but these are not good with noisy backgrounds like a map is. However, the community atlas website is of course backed by the actual community atlas product, the .fcw files themselves, and this is where the text comes from.

This is all done by using an excellent command in CC3+, the create index command. This command was originally made for searching through multiple drawings quickly without the search function having to read each map file every time, but the index it generates is a nice plain text file which can also be used by other tools, such as a web search. If you own products such as the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas or World War II Interactive Atlas, these come with an index file out of the box allowing you to quickly search the maps therein, but of course, you can also easily make your own index file for your own set of maps.

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Have you marveled at the beautiful city maps that Mike Schley has created for the D&D role-playing game and other brands? If not, head over to his web page to see a great selection. Myself, I am a particular fan of his isometric city views like the Candlekeep map you see as the first listed on that page. They give a great overall impression of the location, while also haviong enough precise information to make them really useful as a gaming tool.

Of course I’ve been advocating for a symbol set using this art style for a while here at Profantasy, and I’m now more than happy that I have the first symbols on my desk for by an upcoming set by Mike himself. He’s been busy creating the inked outlines ofr the buildings and kindly provided a few colored ones as well, that I can show off here. Take a look!

So far my job concerning this product has mostly been looking over the incoming symbols, nodding and saying “Yes, they are great, thank you” by way approval. I’m looking forward to diving into creating all the symbols for CC3+ when more of the colored versions come in, and trying my hand at creating isometric city maps with them myself.

Our Dynamic Dungeon project is moving along, and for this installment of the series, I am going to address several interesting concepts and techniques.

• Creating custom entities so we can store our settings with the map.
• Creating dialogs to change settings. Here I also show how we can use owner-drawn lists to draw comboboxes with previews of the fill from the map. We’ll also create macro versions of the settings commands.
• Accessing the drawing InfoBlock to find fills.
• Making sure our tool stop at the map border, the same way that CC3+’s drawing tools does.

I am including the interesting bits of code right here in the article, but I have made minor changes all over the code from the previous articles to accommodate some of the new features from this article, so don’t forget to download the complete project from the link at the end of this article.

To be able to follow this article series, you should have read my earlier articles in the series.

As with the previous installments, here is a short video showing our results so far.

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If you have used Campaign Cartographer for some time, you’ve probably encountered the red X showing up in your map. Perhaps just as simple symbol missing and being replaced by a red X, or maybe your map was covered by them. Today, I’ll talk a little bit about why you may encounter this issue, what the reason behind it is, and what you can do to remedy the situation, as well as tips for avoiding it in the first place.
Hopefully after reading this, you will have a better idea on how CC3+ uses your images, and can avoid this situation in the future.

The Core Reason

The underlying reason this happens is rather simple. When you make a map in CC3+, the map will contain references to the image files used for symbols and fills. These files are not embedded in the map itself. So, every time you open up a CC3+ map, it will look at the references embedded in the map, and will then go and load these image files from your drive. However, if it cannot find these files in the location specified in the map, it won’t know what that image is supposed to look like, and it will display a red X instead indicating this. So, in other words, this happens because the image that was on your drive when you made the map is no longer there, simple as that. This isn’t an issue with CC3+ itself, it is simply a missing image file. So, what we need to look at now, is why this file may be missing. This will influence the best way to go about fixing your map.

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As we’re closing in on the end of the year and looking back on the maps posted by the community in November, there is no sign of you map-makers letting up with the awesome maps. Check out just a few of the cartographic bonanza that the month has been:

Lizzy_Maracuja‘s post-apocalypse settlement of Hope looks wonderful in its two different lighting versions, one at day and one at night.

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Last time in the developer series I started our Dynamic Dungeons project with the intention to showcase how to make some simple tools for a more fluid dungeon editing experience. In this issue, I will continue on with that project, and add some improvements to it, such as taking care that our entities are placed on the right sheets, meaning we will need to dive into sublists, and I will also automatically generate walls to go along with our floors.

As last time, I prepared a short video to show the tools in action. At the end of the video, you’ll also see that I show the classic dungeon tools correctly interacting with my entities.

To be able to follow this article series, you should have read my earlier articles in the series.

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Are you still looking for that treasure in the half-sunken temple on the shoreline? Getting bored by always the same seaweed slushing around your legs? Don’t worry, Sue Daniel has more maritime excitement for you with the second part of the Marine Dungeons style.

New ways to enhance your floors with metallic inlays, connecting walls, new flora and fauna for your shore and sea floor … more than 140 symbols, a dozen new textures and many drawing tools are included in the Marine Dungeon 2 style expansion pack.

The December issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.

Note: The re-subcription offer for the Annual 2022 will become available in mid-December, when we also make one of this year’s Annual issues available for free and release a bonus issue (Darklands City part 2).