Question about CA149 Beaumaris Castle fills

Royal Scribe

I swear, I genuinely thought I was losing my mind. I thought my computer was trying to gaslight me. I think I figured out what's going on, but I still have questions.

(TL;dr note: most of this is a longwinded explanation but the actual question is in the final paragraph.)

As I mentioned in a previous thread about creating barrel roofs, I am working on creating a castle or fortress inspired by the architecture of the Armory in San Francisco. Often when I am embarking on a new project, I start with a test file to experiment with drawing techniques, fill styles and scaling, and sheet effects. That way when I decide on what I want to do, my actual file won't be cluttered with extra fills that I imported and then decided not to use.

One of the things that I thought (incorrectly) was cool about the CA149 Beaumaris Castle when I was creating test designs was that the fills for the floors and the walls had two versions for the fills, allowing me to set different scalings for them. For example, I might use one scaling for the exterior fortification walls and a smaller scaling for the interior walls. (Separate question: is that a terrible idea, visually, to have interior and exterior walls with different scaling with the same or similar fill?) Here's a mockup where I had different scaling for the granite floor tiles, wall sections, and wall top.

But then when I looked at the folder on my computer for Bitmaps - Tiles - Castles, it only had one fill for each of the floors and the walls (e.g., one for the granite floors, one for the limestone floors, etc.).

And when I looked at the FCW file in CA149, it also only had one fill for each:

...unlike my test file that had two for each, like "Floor - granite Bitmap" and "Floor - grant SMC":

So here's what I think I did. I think in my test file, when I was importing a bunch of fills to experiment with, I copied in one of the Beaumaris Castle FCW files, but then I also imported the fills from Bitmaps - Tiles - Castle. (Why would I import both? Lord only knows. I was importing so many different things from DD3, Mike Schley, etc. that I probably forgot I had already imported one.) The fills in the Beaumaris FCW files are the ones with "SMC" in the name, and I guess that when the annual was created, they were tweaked or something, and renamed?

(I didn't figure any of this out until I was in the process of making screen captures to ask the community what was going on.)

So here's my question: if I were to use a copy of the Beaumaris FCW file as a template (because I like the sheets that are already set up), are the SMC-labeled fills shareable, like if I were to submit my completed castle to the Atlas? From a sharable perspective, could I use both the ones labeled Bitmap and the ones labeled SMC? (And from an aesthetic perspective, which is not my strength, is it a terrible idea to use both with different scaling?). Or should I only use the ones labeled "Bitmap"?

Monsen

For sharing, yes, it is completely fine. The only things that matters when sharing the file is that the recipient have the actual art files on disk. You can make as many fills as you want inside the map without that being a problem, sharing issues only becomes an issue if you manipulate the png's on disk (such as making copies of them). As long as you can see inside that fill style dialog that both versions point to the same png files, then everything is fine.