A few fantasy maps

[SirJoe]

Hi folks,

Here are a few of my older maps that I've converted for use with FG. I think the scale should be ok, but if you need something different, let me know and I'll repost.

1. Player Map of the Twin Kingdoms. Historically, maps were of huge value and considered state secrets. Perhaps someone has stollen this map and your heroes have to go after it? Or perhaps the heroes have got their hands on the map and are now fending off the enemy's attempts to get it back? Hmmm...


2. The City States of the Ten Pirate Lords. Everyone's favorite villians! Pirates. Arrrggg! :pirate:

3. The Invaded Lands. This is from a mini-campaign I put together where the undead have taken over a kingdom and are set on destroying the living. Very much a standard, good versus evil situation.

[Oberoten]

Do you do tutorials?
Maps has always been one of my weak spots...

[Valarian]

Someone's got the Sarah Wroot map style pack for CC3 ;)
The maps are very good - demonstrates the style nicely

To show off another style - John Speed style map of a region.
My home town and the surrounding area.

[Kalan]

Do you do tutorials?
Maps has always been one of my weak spots...

I second this...my maps always tend to suck. Mostly I have issues with scales and gettin them to look good in FG, and still have no issues with transmissions.

[SirJoe]

Someone's got the Sarah Wroot map style pack for CC3 ;)
The maps are very good - demonstrates the style nicely

To show off another style - John Speed style map of a region.
My home town and the surrounding area.


I love your John Speed map! Any chance of some towns to go with that. I tried to make a couple of John Steed towns, but they all looked too crowded and getting the city walls to line was agonizing. Perhaps I'm just lazy! :p

Yes, these maps are based on the Sarah Wroot style. In fact, the first of those maps was actually called "Sarah Wroot Test" but I really like the colorful nature of the style so I'm doing a lot of my overland maps in this way now.

Another trick I've been using in the past is to load the maps into photoshop and 'parchmentize' them to look anchient. This looks great when printing out highly detailed overland maps, even when using the standard cc2 symbols. However, they do not scale down well for online use - it's more of a print only thing.

[SirJoe]

Do you do tutorials?
Maps has always been one of my weak spots...


I did my first GF server tests with a couple of maps last night and found the maps I had put up were just too heavy for the network load.

As a result, I've been messing with different settings and options for getting the maps down to an acceptable level while still keeping them clear and at least moderately professional looking.

I am pretty sure I've cracked it now, though I've still got more experimenting to do to see if I can speed up process - there will always be a trade-off between quality and speed of loading (which I assume equates to speed of play.)

There are actually two different methods for getting the maps down to size and I'll write them up as a tutorial over the next week or two.

Best regards,
Joseph

[Oberoten]

Perfect. And much aprechiated. I really need to work on my graphical skills.

- Obe

[SirJoe]

Following are the three overland maps rescaled into a format more suitable for in-play use with FG. One thing I have not done (and will need to be done for future maps) is resize text labels... more on that in future tutorials.

I have attempted to keep maps under 400k in size, the ideal is less than 120k. The reason for this is partly how FG deploys maps, and partly due to the erratic nature of some players connections.

I *think* this is how FG works (would be happy to be corrected if I have it wrong). When requested to share or preload an image, FG opens up file transfers to each players PC. This means that a stream is created for each and every player - ie. if you have 5 players, then 5 streams are sent. If you are preloading more than one image, then I *think* multiple streams for each user will be established. While these streams are being sent, you are also still sending and receiving message events from the players, plus most likely having Skype or some other VoiP open.

With sufficient broadband, having all these outgoing streams from a server is not much of an issue. However, many broadband accounts (like mine) are asymetrical, meaning that they have say 512 up and 1500 down. That means I can receive a lot more info at the same time than I can send. In this situation, the outgoing bandwidth of the FG server can begin to choke, which thottles back all file sends and thus the images can take increasingly longer to load.

I'd like to suggest a two ways for FG to overcome this potential for server bottle-neck.

1. Include a tool that allows images to be uploaded to an external web server of the GM's selection when he/she is setting up the game (eg. built in FTP to a webhost) and then have these referenced in the image list, but not actually stored on the FG host. When shared, the images act exactly the same as those stored locally, but players pull the files from the web host.

2. A little more complex solution would be to have the clients shared files in a peer-to-peer manner. eg. the load of transmitting files could be shared by the players. This is not really my preferred option, as its likely that all player will start receiving the files pretty much at the same time.

Cheers, JS

[Belizan]

You did those maps with CC3? I heard CC3 was an amazing pain to learn how to use?

[Kalan]

You did those maps with CC3? I heard CC3 was an amazing pain to learn how to use?

Not much more so than most graphics programs imo. Once you get the basic commands down, its really easy to make maps in it. Its when you get into the more advanced stuff like shading and the like where it can be a little problematic :)

[SirJoe]

Most the maps you see here took me about 30-60min to create using CC3. The thing with CC3 is, its got a LOT of power and it's all fully exposed, which means that when you first start with the program, you can tend to go 'huh?' However, there are a heap of short-cut features in CC3 that make mapping very easy and fast. The most important of these are the 'style' buttons. You can make a lovely map in no time at using only the preset styles (for example, the Invaded Lands map used only preset styles and took just under 30 min to produce.
Of course, if you want to make your map look totally unqiue, you can customize almost anything using CAD-like tools (yes, there is a FULL Autocad clone under the hood of CC3.) And this is where the learning curve really takes off and what scares off some people.
Incidentally, I find the Dungeon Designer (DD3) add-on to be so damn easy to use that I almost never go the advanced CAD features. The rooms I have uploaded previously were blindingly easy - some took less than a few minutes to draw. The DD3 add-on is a must have if you are looking at CC3 as a mapping tool.
Cheers,
JS

[Belizan]

Any suggestions on where to find some good tutorials? I have CC3 now, and I went through the sort of updated CC2 "quick start" guide that it comes with, but, I still don't have a good feel for how to make nice looking maps (some effects are just beyond my kenning). The interface is incredibly unintuitive for me, which isn't helping either. I subscribed to the annual in hopes they would have some walkthrus on how to make maps like their monthly samples, but if they do I haven't found them. Just style/symbol packs that I can't find after I've installed them :(.

Any suggestions?

[Valarian]

The interface is a CAD engine at it's heart. It's different from the graphics tools like Photoshop etc. Once you do get to grips with it, it'll pay. All I can say is persevere with it. Even I, with very limited artistic ability and just a sense of aesthetics to go on, can produce decent looking maps.

Go to the Profantasy Website and go to the registration page, where you have got all of your license keys. On the right hand side, there is a complete cartography suite manual. It's for CC2Pro, but going through this should get you started on some of the more advanced stuff.

The annuals are installed in your CC3 installation directory in a folder called Annuals. The PDFs describing how to produce the example maps are in this folder. There are subfolders for each month.

All your symbols are in the CC3 installation directory, under a folder called symbols.

There are then some tutorials on the web
https://www.fantasist.net/cartography.shtml

The Yahoo group cc2-l is the online community page for Campaign Cartographer. They are very friendly and helpful. But please, do the tutorials first, they will really help you get to grips with the basics of CC3.