Feature Suggestion Thread
JackTheMapper
🖼️ 3 images Traveler
The Annuals are amazing and chock full of really quality content. I don't know how Ralf et al keep coming up with it. I also see threads here and there where people mention a feature they'd like to see, so I thought let's make a thread!
I'd love to see a dedicated tool or symbol pack for navigation lines. We can make them of course--@Loopysue did a great tutorial, and I was recently given a link to a Live Mapping session that also demonstrates it in a particular style pack. However I think it'd be great to have a style pack with multiple base shapes, styles, and so on to make this easier and quicker, and even a tool that would allow us to pick a point on a map, click, choose options, and have the nav / rhumb lines auto-generate and extend to the edge of the map.
How about you? Is there a feature, style, or other aspect of mapping you'd like to see? Share it here and maybe it'll end up on a list for future annuals!
Comments
I have thoughts on things I'd love to see in future Annuals, but if I mention something that already exists in an older Annual, please advise and I may go buy it!
If Mike Schley is still doing monthlies:
(* With these, I dug through the Mike Schley symbols and found some that could work -- the varicolor "chair ornate" could make for a golden throne, and there's standing armor in weapons. But I haven't found any couches or lounges, just benches and chairs. And there's small area rugs but nothing I saw that could make for a long stretch of carpeting.)
(** The temples and necromancer sets have some of these, though I don't recall seeing feathered quills.)
Also, I have some great photorealistic fills for these sorts of things already, but I'd love more illustrated-style fills for granite, more marble, maybe carpeting?
here have a big list to mike schley montlhy content. Still waiting oriental and greco roman structures for overland. Maybe it's not a bad idea to consider a monthly content in Cartographers annual with a massive contribution of new images, default terrains etc.
https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/comment/107955#Comment_107955
Cheers
I would love Sue to do some monthly's for her Spectrum Overland style
I agree that Sue should add more to Spectrum Overland. I would prefer that to be the default style. At the very least, I would like more structure symbols. In addition:
With all the talk of marine stuff how color ocean floor landform style map. I like Marie Tharp's style:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/%28Manuscript_painting_of_Heezen-Tharp_World_ocean_floor_map_by_Berann%29.jpg
Expanse RPG style maps for ships and interiors: https://imgur.com/a/TJkzpto and https://imgur.com/VJhRPAU
The lack of hard sci-fi style is kinda depressing. :)
Off the topic of annuals and on the topic of feature suggestions, I'd like to suggest CC4 be cross-platform. Come-on let's show Mac users some love!
@jmabbott As they say in the country we both are in ; Yeah, Nah
The expanse maps look pretty similar to what you can already do in Cosmographer and its existing annuals. I would like something that looks better.
We've had repeated discussions about submarine mapping styles on the Forum here. I've tinkered about with existing styles and a few additions of my own for use in the Community Atlas. I'd definitely love to see someone tackle these more fully, but am far from sure it'll happen in the short-term.
The main problems revolve around not having access to the same kind of imaging you can get easily for surface landforms, so it's much harder to create artistic symbols and fill styles, because these simply don't exist, and never have done. The Tharp style is fine, but essentially, this is all there is to draw upon of this type for the deep undersea environment especially, and it falls apart as soon as you try to use it for areas less than oceanic in scale, primarily because the detailed mapping to help also to a large extent doesn't exist (plus these maps are interpretations of instrumental readings, such as sonar, which don't give the same impression you would get if you saw the features in reality; the Tharp maps are calibrated and redrawn artistically to fit with more familiar visual landscape impressions - like using wall shadows in dungeons, say, even when you know those couldn't be really there).
There are undersea features that have no land-based equivalents, such as seamounts, trenches and mid-ocean ridges, much of which remain remarkably poorly-understood, often because the areas are difficult to access and impossible to image visually on anything beyond a very limited scale. Even trying to find a reliable drawing of what a single, fully-grown giant kelp looks like (they're usually far too big to image, at up to a couple of hundred metres in height), proved a nightmare when I tried to do so some years back for my Atlas symbols. Photo images show only bits at a time, or from oblique angles, because of the size issue, and the fact they grow in dense forests commonly makes it hard to tell which bit belongs to which kelp! It is possible to make an artistic interpretation, much as the overland styles often use slightly vague interpretations of trees, and it's that "vagueness" I relied on, certainly!
So yes, one more vote for more undersea mapping options (though I have voted for this repeatedly anyway 😁) - just don't hold your breath 😉!
Wishful thinking on my part...
Maybe I am just too confident in Sue's ability to handle these issues ;)
Cosmographer's assets seem too retro and a bit trippy to me. They are fine for some space fantasy setting. Retro Starships style pack looks way better, but using such maps in VTTs is impractical due to the large amount of text.
Of course it's just a matter of taste. Surely maps made by Miska and Moonlight are better.