Polygon and landmass properties changed with no apparent reason

lychee

Dear CC3 community,

I've got a few questions on a (supposedly) technically simple map style which, during working on the map, went wrong in a couple of ways.

First I need to say that I don't work with CC3 myself (yet), but that I'm asking for a young friend who's too shy to do that himself, but loves mapmaking and, while he loves the tool essentially, is deeply frustrated by now. I hope someone can help us fix these issues.

Template: Annual Jonathan Roberts

The map: A height-map (sea + landmass + 10 fractyl polygons above + lakes + rivers, everything filled with solid color) of a world with severcal continents which started out as a map of only one continent. Unfortunately, it's attached to two others, so upon resizing the map, the new landmasses created seams where the continents overlap.

Combining the polys only led to the loss of the coastline as such, only a simple outline could be created, so we discarded this option and instead tried to hide the overlap with another poly of the same color as the landmasses. Yet no matter on which layer it is placed, the coastline seams remain visible.

With the resized map, some other problems occured:

Many rivers (originally width 1) were suddenly at 0.5, while others remained at their original settings. Some rivers changed their color to a darker, unused blue.

Lakes lost their outline.

Fractalisation is now, despite the same settings, more detailed, with 4+ nodes instead of 2 or 3.

Landmasses lost their coastline.

Polygon tools lead only to outlines and cannot be filled any more, despite property changes.

We'd be really thankfulfor any kind of hint or solution!

Best,

the lychee and the unknown cartographer :)

OverCriticalHit

It's highly doubtful I'll be the one with the answers, but to help out those who will be able to help you it'd probably be best if you attached the .fcw file so they can see the issues in play. This one sounds like it would be hard to diagnose without the actual map.

Monsen

Combining the polys only led to the loss of the coastline as such, only a simple outline could be created, so we discarded this option and instead tried to hide the overlap with another poly of the same color as the landmasses. Yet no matter on which layer it is placed, the coastline seams remain visible.

Don't do this. CC3+ isn't a painting program where you can hide things by painting over them. When landmasses are connected, they should be a single entity.

You can always edit an entity (see https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/7620/command-of-the-week-drawtools-edit-week-40) or combine multiple entities (see https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/7048/command-of-the-week-complex-shapes-part-1-week-11) [Apologies for the images all appearing at the bottom of the instructions, these posts need to be reformatted for the upgraded forum]

Also, what layer you have things on doesn't matter, layers are just groupings, it is the sheets that determine order in the drawing.

Many drawing tools take their properties as percentage of the map border, which means they get larger as when the map gets larger, and also affect fractal settings for drawtools. This only applies to new entities drawn though, not existing ones in the map. Color changes could eb because of effects, these can also be configured in sizes relative to the map size, which means they can get larger compared to entities in the map, and thus cause shifts in color, depending on what kind of effect it is.

For fill settings, make sure the fill style is set to Solid and not Outline if you fill with solid colors, otherwise the fill style needs to be set to whatever bitmap you want.

lychee

Dear OverCriticalHit, Dear Monsen,

wow, this surely helps a lot! Thank you so much for your answers.

We'd upload the map file if someone wants to have a look at it (PM), but for now, he'll try and fix the problems with the help of Monsen's information.

Especially knowing nowing that properties depend on the map size motivates a lot, since now he can fix everything without worrying that it happens again.

Sorry about the "layers": That one was my fault as a photoshop user. It appears as if the sheets were what I actually meant, yet the borders still show no matter the position of the green poly. He'll try and combine the entities another way. In case that he runs into other problems or if new questions pop up, he'd be back for your advice.

In any case, you made my mapmaking friend very happy. :)

Best regards!

Loopysue

Hello lychee :)

Welcome to the forum.

lychee

Thanks for the warm welcome, loopysue! :)