advice for large circular map
moskthescribe
Newcomer
I'd like to make a large, circular (or oval) world map (10,000 miles from east to west, and 8000 from north to south), which more or less has a ring of mountainous terrain around the periphery and several continental landmasses set in the oceans bounded by the ring of mountains.
CC3 Plus had been rock solid for all of my previous trials over the last month or two. But while working on this large map, I'm getting frequent crashes or freezing of the program that lasts for many minutes. Using a Windows 10 Pro PC with lots of RAM and decent video card.
Any suggestions for drawing the peripheral terrain and mountains?
I'm guessing it's the fractalized edges of such a large landmass that's leading to the problem.
In similar vein, can you take a donut (a multipoly made from two circles so you get a hole in the middle) and fractalize that?
Thanks.
Comments
Use List in the Info menu to find out how many nodes you have in that large landmass. It's the node count that really slows CC3 down. over 10,000 is where it starts to get slow, while 30,000 is nearly impossible to work with. But do you really need that many? In most cases, not really.
If you can get away with it without losing something important, use SIMPLIFY to get rid of unnecessary nodes. Even if you use a very small factor with SIMPLIFY, it will still get rid of any nodes that are right on top of each other and not really doing much because they are too close to make any difference.
Fractalise is a high risk tool to use. If you use it too many times all you end up doing is making the coastline frilly and CC3 slow, neither of which are good things. I don't recommend fractalising anything large more than twice with the default settings and definitely no more than 3 times. You also have to consider that however many nodes you end up with in the coastline you will double that if you then trace the coastline with all your terrain fills.
If you want to be able to edit and trace your coastline, use a colour key for the central ocean instead of multipolying the two parts. A multipoly can't be traced, edited, or fractalised.
No matter what my computer has in the way of ram or video cards, I find that fractalize a polygon more than 3 times is asking for problems. So I limit myself to 3 at the most. Sometimes i need to only fractalize once to get what I want.
If three doesn't do it, I erase the polygon, and redraw it, with less of a smooth outline, then fractalize it.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for replies. I'll take a look at my total number of nodes, because I certainly don't need high levels of detail for that outer ring - and I'll make sure to run Info>List after Fractalizing in the future just to have a clear sense of what I'm generating.
But the Color Key effect is fantastic! I almost posted elsewhere to see if Campaign Cartographer had any 'masking' features like you might find in PhotoShop or AfterEffects. Certain to get lots of use out of this effect.
CC3+ goes through spells with me. It used to crash frequently, not so much now. Maybe the recent updates helped.
In any case, CC3+ uses old 32-bit code and the program is built around vectors. What does that mean? That every time it draws, it uses your CPU instead of your graphics card. It runs through these complicated math formulas. Being 32 bit means it can only use 4GB of RAM. Being old means that is written for only one core of the CPU.
In other words, you can have a top line computer, but the program is not capable of taking advantage of most of it.
With that said, I have found that saving frequently helps with preventing crashes. Also, sometimes I exit the program and start again. Those were tricks in the past to keep from having crashes.
Indeed. I save as to a sequence of filenames. Save as filename01_0001, edit and add symbols, save as filename02_0002, etc.
How often I save depends:
1) If something is a difficult process for me, I save as often.
2) If I'm just placing symbols, I don't save as often, unless I do something like mountains, then save as before I start forests. Or save between rivers.
It all comes down to what I feel safe doing. if I feel, sudden slow response from my computer as example, I save as. Then exit, and maybe reboot.
I have found if I look at videos, then I reboot before map making. The VLC player I use, and sometimes Youtube itself, doesn't release ram properly. So I reboot, then log back into my computer and make maps.
Thanks for the tips so as to avoid losing work with a crash.
A shame about the 32bit limitations. Do either of you know if there's any plan to update to 64 bit at some point?
What are the 32-bit limitations? That is, what does being 32-bit keep you from doing with the program?
I'm not sure about being single threaded, either. When I do a redraw with effects on,it looks like my task manager shows all of the cores in use during a lot of that time.
I'm not sure how much relates the program being 32-bit, but from other 3d or animation programs I've used, being able to go beyond the 4GB RAM limitation (in 64-bit programs), utilize multi-threading, and take advantage of modern GPUs all helped to avoid crashes and dramatically reduce lags in performance. Right now, while working with a large (10,000 x 10,000 miles) I'm frequently running into issues where the interface freezes in the middle of commands, taking anywhere from a couple of seconds to 30 seconds to unfreeze - and I have had a few crashes. On the default sized maps (of 1000 x 800 miles) I hadn't had any issues.
Slow rendering is often caused by having very many nodes in an entity or having certain kinds of effects running (blurs with a large radius are usually the biggest offender). There is also an intermittent and apparently system-dependent bug that sometimes causes multiple successive redraws, which appears as a long pause; I don't have a solid reproduction case, so I haven't been able to put that one to rest. CC3+ mostly just hands off the drawing work to Windows, which may or may not use the GPU for some part of the rendering. CC3+ does have multi-threading for a lot of the effects rendering, but it would get faster redraws (and whole new classes of vendor-dependent bugs) with explicit GPU support.
I ask questions about expected benefits and current problems because addressing those kinds of issues is important.
Hey jslayton -
Thanks for the extra information. And I appreciate you asking questions to proactively improve the product; these forums have been phenomenal and I feel I really will get up to speed this time and start using the program in a productive manner.
In terms of the program stalling or slowing down for me, I had forgotten about toggling off the effects (even though I've read about doing that multiple times). Just switched them off now (mostly glows, transparency, and edge fades), and in ten seconds of testing, the interface seems to respond much quicker.
32 bit limits your RAM to 4 GB. Theoretically, there is no reason why a 32 bit program cannot use multiple cores. However, the program needs to be coded in such a way to really take advantage of the cores. This is why in the early days of 2/4 core CPUs single core processors tended to do substantially better than more cores. Even now, many programs are not coded that way. When coding for 64 bit, the programmers usually code for multiple core use because it is assumed all PCs will have multiple cores..
On a practical note, I will put it this way. I have 8 cores running at 4 Ghz. I have 16 GB of RAM. At times, I have had Photoshop, Indesign, creating PDFs, multiple web pages open, etc and never a slow down. I have played two video games at the same time, without a hiccup. I have run both Blender and Fusion 360 at the same time without any issues. With CC3+ running, it says I am using ~10% of my CPU. Yet, CC3+ is the only program that runs slows (or I have to worry about crashing).
So, maybe CC3+ does spread activity through all of the cores, but if CC3+ were coded to actually use my cores, I should never have any slowdowns. So either it does not really use the cores, or is not programmed in a manner to actually use them more effectively than a single core.
@JulianDracos wrote:
So, maybe CC3+ does spread activity through all of the cores, but if CC3+ were coded to actually use my cores, I should never have any slowdowns. So either it does not really use the cores, or is not programmed in a manner to actually use them more effectively than a single core.
That is a simplification of how things work though. Not all tasks can be parallelized (and this holds true in new modern 64-bit software too, there are many cases where you simply cannot start calculating the next step before you know the result of the previous calculation), so even if a program uses multiple cores, there will often be times where there is a longer running task running on a single core which needs to finish before more cores can be spun up with other tasks. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't utilize multiple cores in a good way.
For a simple example, if half the workload can be hugely parallelized, but half needs to run on a single thread, it still halves the execution time compared to running on just a single core, even if the other cores seems idle a lot of the time. This can happen because the parallelizable workload get split all over the cores, so with 8 cores, the computer will chug through those parts much more quickly. Of course it would be nice if it could use all the cores all the time, but that's simply not always possible.
(Not claiming CC3+ can't be improved here, just highlighting some of the general issues with multiple cores and parallel processes)
@JulianDracos It truly is as you say.