Slow Application Performance
I'm sure this has been asked a bunch before but I can't find references through search... Recently when I'm editing maps where I've used the fill tool to produce forests the application performance has tanked tremendously. It's taking about thirty seconds to complete a zoom action, and a minute or more to do an Undo action. I've got around 3,000 symbols on the map using the Parchment style (CA128). Wondering if it's just something wonky with this style or what. My rig has an i9-11900k with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB M.2 SSD for a system drive so it should be more than sufficient to run this...
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I used a base map size of 600 miles x 400 miles. Here's an export of the in-progress map.
Three thousand symbols is a big number.
Larger the area covered by a map, the fewer symbols.
I just feel like I'd used comparable or more symbols with maps in the past. I was wondering if it had to do with transparency or other rendering issues. I'm nowhere near pegged on CPU and RAM utilization. I used the 'Symbols In Area' feature to generate the forests with polygon shapes and it doesn't look any denser than the samples from the cartographer's annual I was using as a reference guide. I'm using a horizontal/vertican distance of 6 with scale from 100% to 200% on the symbols. If that's too many trees, what would be a good target for getting something that looks visually 'full' without crushing performance?
Campaign Cartographer is a 32 bit program. It uses a maximum of 4 megs of ram. I don't think it uses a graphics card.
For large areas, I put a color down, a few tree symbols to show the type of trees, and give it a name.
Small area maps, 1000 feet or less, a map can have many symbols.
Hmmm... have you tried with effects off ?
If you wouldn't mind, please post the fcw and someone will look at it.
I've been playing with the style for the first time just now, and it would seem from what I've done that the sheer number of trees may be the problem here.
You could try deleting a few of them perhaps?
My map was starting to get a little slow, but nothing like the way you describe. It was only about half a second delay.
It is a matter of taste, of course, and maybe you think the trees need to be overlapping, but they look pretty good at much lower densities.
Vector symbols and fills can kill performance in CC3+, especially if they incorporate curved elements rather than simple polygons.
I'm running my monitor at 4k resolution. Could that be affecting performance as well, then? If it's limited to a 4mb page file...
Here's the FCW file. I've removed the trees symbols from it so you can see the polygons I used for fill. Like I said before, I used the 'Symbols in Area' feature to get a nice dense fill on them. I can go sparser but I really like the full look of the overlapping trees. If there's a better way to achieve the desired result I'm definitely open to it! Here's the settings I used for the 'Symbols in Area' command.
Is there maybe a way to select all the trees I've placed and turn them into a single merged bitmap so it's not computing each individual symbol on screen refresh? Also, I've tuned down the 'max symbols' which is actually 10,000 by default... haha.
The page file size has little to do with the problems you are reporting. The screen resolution can result in reduced performance. The easiest test for this is to reduce the window size for the application. If redraw gets faster as the window size gets smaller, then it is definitely cpu-bound during rendering. The windows task manager will also show a thread at 100% for the duration of the redraw pause.
I did a blog about how to make your own bitmap fill from PF symbols here:
Generating Seamless Tiles Part 1 – Making seamless tiles in Campaign Cartographer
https://rpgmaps.profantasy.com/generating-seamless-tiles-part-1-making-seamless-tiles-in-campaign-cartographer/Thanks, Loopysue! That's a great resource - I'll try using that as a fill style for my polygons. I'm assuming I can set that to inherit the same transparency settings for sheet effects that the map style uses so it looks seamless with manually placed trees?
And Jslayton, I tried the same file with ~3000 symbols with 1920x1080 resolution on my second monitor and it did speed up pretty drastically.
You're welcome :)
Any seamless bitmap fill you make this way will behave like any other seamless bitmap fill. What it won't have are all those thousands of nodes.
With the custom bitmap tile, rendering speed and performance are(unsurprisingly) way better - I need to get the transparency right around the edges so the additional tree symbols I place look right with sheet effects enabled but I'm overall pleased with the result! =)
Good, I'm glad it all worked out in the end :)
Looks like you did a good job with that fill.
Nice looking map, to.