Annual No 1 issue 12 - Making a new style.
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I am going to attempt to design a new style for cities, based loosely on Watabou style, but with quite a few new drawtools. The style is called ABCM (stands for A Blank City Map = so it appears at the top of the city wizard template list). I have already made the Template, along with png and txt file. It will allow DXF's to be imported if you want to do a Watabou map, but it is not required.
The ones illustrated here are gatehouse, walls, towers, military buildings on top of gate houses etc, parks with fences, fences, palisades, dikes, swamps and bogs, sewers, orchards, grapevines, fields with automatic aligning furrows, hedge.
More to follow. More drawtools and vector symbols drawn by me!
I am torn between using only vector and no bitmaps, and perhaps Symbol fills for pavements etc. I have already used variable plain colours for houses and trees.
However, as I need 3 sheets if I use symbol fills, I will have to write a macro, and as @Monsen knows, I am rather inept at this. Pics to be posted tomorrow.
Comments
Here are some pictures. Not that pretty, but just to show all my new tools (the road isn't).
First walls, towers - round, square and rectangular, with crenalations. Also a sewer, a river with a central depth, and buildings with no need for an outline, due to effects.
Problem - the walls. I ideally need a third element, so I have a top layer (the walkway), a middle layer (the crenalations) and a bottom layer (the wall underneath the crenalations. Any chance of a macro from you clever guys?
Next picture shows a dike, with a palisade, bridge with rails, orchard, grape vines, furrowed fields with hedge. (the furrowed fields are drawn using a hatch style which automatically aligns with first line drawn) and a bog with symbol fill on top. In addition, I have got variable colour buildings, just by not using bitmap fills. The trees are also automatic variable colours.
So, what next.
Ideally, I want this to be all vector, so I probably need a special colour palette for some rows in the colour chart.
I will make a lot of use of symbol fills and hatch fills to replace bitmaps. eg paving, tiles, tufts of grass, etc.
I need connecting symbols for hedges, low stone walls like those that infest Cornwall (making driving very interesting!) and tree avenues.
I need to improve the orchards and grapevines and work on the fences and palisades more.
And above all, I need a macro that will allow me to have 3 (or more) layers rather than the limit of 2 in the current drawing tool menu.
As for vector symbols I need to do: top down domes, witches hats for tower tops and minarets, fountains, statues, steps in front of houses and outdoor stairs, chimneys and arches.
I already have roads with footpaths. I also want ones with a median strip and avenue of trees down the middle, and two layered mud and dirt roads and 'squares'.
As I am going along, I am working out various sheets, their order and effects.
I certainly would like suggestions, and special help for those macros.
Help needed as detailed below. Be aware that i am a macro dunce.
The drawing tool macro for aligning fields can be found in the Ferraris Style, and in the more recent Darklands City style.
I'll pass on the rest.
You can't put symbols along just some of the edges of a shape. Symbols along will put them along all edges. I guess you can write a complex macro that figures out which are short and long edges, and calculates positions and puts symbols along them, but that is getting a bit complicated.
To make lines that doesn't change appearance as you zoom in/out, make sure they are using line styles that do not have paper scale enabled:
To align fill in a drawing tool, check out the macros in the Garden tools in the Annual Ferraris city style, it does exactly that.
Can one macro an offset command in the drawtool, especially with the new offset command?
You can use TOFFSET in a macro, but it is a bit tricky since it uses single entity pick instead of a regular selection. Means you cannot select with prior, but you can select it if you know the coordinates of the entity (But these are tricky to get for an entity drawn with a drawtool)
Depending on the kind of offset and lines you need, the double lines [DBLN] command may be easier to use in a macro.
I have managed to get the walls and towers to work the way I want, along with palisades, except as noted below. For my vector style, there is no problem, as solid fills and vector symbols are used throughout. However, I am aiming to do a parallel style using bitmap fills and png symbols. And herein lies my difficulty.
I have used the rectangle/Square option in the drawing tools, with the macro mentioned below.
SELSAVE
SELBYP
SHADEPOLY 0 0
SETFSFLAGS 192
SELREST
1> It doesn't work on Rectangle/squares but does on path/polygon.
2> Shade Polygon by edge does work on the entities drawn by the drawtool using Rectangle/square, as well as any entity drawn with the square tool on the right.
Therefore, to my feeble brain, there should be a macro which will align fills for rectangle/squares. I don't really care which edge, though the first edge would be good.
Seems to be some weirdness with how the drawing tools makes these shapes. Normally, when you draw something, it is made available as the last selection, which is why you can select it with SELBYP and then apply various commands to it. Unfortunately, the rectangle drawing option doesn't seem to be doing this, which means the entity won't be selected, and thus won't have the commands applied to it. Not really a good workaround around that if you can't use the polygon shape, as there isn't a way to figure out what you just drew which is what a macro like this needs to do.
<unintelligble sounds of pain, anguish and sorrow>
Can @jslayton provide a fix. It seems strange that a rectangle made with the button on the right can be selected - by Prior - and can be acted upon by Shade Polygon by edge; as can the rectangle drawn by the drawing tool, just not as part of the tool.
<Chopin's Funeral Marche now playing>
It's on my list of things to look at, but I don't have an estimate as to when it will get to the top of the heap, sorry.