Upgrading old CC2 maps

Thorf

Hi there.

A few years ago, I asked for help in this forum with converting old CC-DOS maps, and I was highly impressed with the warm and kind response. I wonder if I might trespass on your time once more, to ask for help of a similar nature.

A little background... I run the Atlas of Mystara web site, which aims to collect not just my own maps but eventually all maps created by fans for the old D&D world of Mystara. Recently I have almost completed adding all of the fan-made maps in my collections for the years 1996-2003 — a lot of maps.

However, I have become a little stuck with the last set of maps, which is what brings me here.

The set in question is a wonderful group of maps created (I believe) in Campaign Cartographer 2 from 2001-2003. They were available online at the original cartographer’s web site until it went down quite recently. I have a copy of the CC2 files here, along with a set of exported GIF files here.

As you can see, I already have copies of all of the maps in a form appropriate for posting at the Atlas of Mystara. However, the resolution is low, to the point that the labels are all but unreadable on some of the maps. I would love to upgrade these maps to a higher resolution. Since the source files are available, this seems possible.

But there’s a caveat: I’d like to maintain the look and feel of the original maps as much as possible. This means the same symbols, fonts, etc. if at all possible.

I have tried loading the files up into CC3+ myself, with very mixed results. The simple truth is that I’m just not good enough with this software to achieve what I want. Most of the files don’t seem to even resemble their original images, and I’m at a loss as to how to fix it.

Note that there are a lot of files in those folders, but I only need a subset of them. The maps I need are:

• m_wholeworld.gif
• m_b10_map_k.gif
• m_b10_foamfirevalley.gif
• m_b10_thelostvalley.gif
• m_karameikos.gif
• m_ylaruam.gif
• m_barimoor.gif
• m_glantri-nation.gif
• m_x2averoigne.png
• m_pc4_valeedesloups.png

I would appreciate any help you may be able to provide, whether it’s helping walk me through the process, troubleshooting what I’m doing wrong, or if it’s not too much work for some kind soul to convert them for me.

For what it’s worth, I have the permission of the original cartographer to repost his maps.

Thank you for reading.

Thorfinn

Monsen

In most cases, CC2 files can just be loaded straight into CC3+ and they should work. There is one big breaking change though, in CC2, everything on the Common sheet (these are actually things that are not on a sheet at all) displayed on top of everything else, but now these goes in the background.

There is a CC2 to CC3 converter in the File menu, but in this case, unless you want to do more work with them, it may actually be better to skip that, and instead just make a new sheet, then move every entity that is on Common to this new sheet, and make sure it is at the bottom of the list of sheets. This should ensure the file look the same as it did in CC2.

Now, looking at those images (I looked at wholeworld and Karameikos), it does seem like they have been post-processed to add a more textured feel. I can't find any indication in the .fcw's that this texture came from there, neither does it look like CC2 texturing (although I might be wrong). Obviously, replicating that exactly will be tricky, but there are many things that can be done in CC3+ to maybe approach a similar feel if that is what you are after.

The maps have also been drawn with zero-width lines, which was common for these old maps. The issue with that is that the lines will always export as thin as possible (1 pixel wide), so when exporting in higher resolution, this will also make the lines appear thinner compared to those old exports. So here, they should probably be given a proper width instead.

All of this will require some work processing those maps.

Fonts are not embedded into the map files, but as long as you have the right fonts installed on your computer, these should be used to provide the right look here. You can always inspect a text entity and see what font it is set up to use if you use the List command from the Info menu on them.

I am not sure exactly where you want to go from here, so I just leave this as a small introduction for now. Let us know if you need help with any of this and we'll happily provide more detailed instructions, or if there is anything else you are thinking about when you say the maps doesn't look like the images.

Don Anderson Jr.

I have converted 850+ maps from CC2 to CC3+. Definitely not an expert (who knows maybe I've done more conversions than anyone on the planet LOL), but there are some issues you will face for sure, that will give you a lot of headaches and wasted time.

So if you are using the automated "CC2 to CC3 conversion" what follows is what you may encounter.

The program does a great job of moving everything to the CC3+ format, with the exception of the moving layers over to sheets. This is most likely a by product of the old layers system and how individuals used those.

First thing once the conversion is done, ensure that none of the "Layers" are hidden. Uncheck them all.

So with that said, you may have to go through each individual map. Then manually go through each and every sheet to see what is on each sheet. "Hide All" start with the top most sheet listed. Keep going through the sheets to see if anything is on a sheet that is buried under another sheet.

When I went through the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas doing those conversions. Certain map styles had 5 sheets out of sequence per map. I had to re-arrange them and then place them between other sheets. This may well be something you will encounter.

Some instances certain entities were on wrong sheets and had to "change properties" so they would go the the right sheet.

Hopefully your conversions won't be so difficult, but the above could be something you will have to deal with. Good Luck.