Issues with drawing tools + inquiry

T6A5

Hi there,

I've been away for a few months but now I'm back and I would like to continue work on my mapping projects. Before I can do that, however, I have some inquiries:

I'm working with the Modern City style from the 2007 Annual pack. From looking at the product description on the site,

http://www.profantasy.com/annual/2007/september07.html

it mentions 35 new symbols in 2 catalogs. However, my installation does not offer nearly so much. I have a scalebar, parking symbol, tourist info, hospital, church and 2 buildings (red and black). Has anyone experienced this? Would it be a faulty installation? My installation doesn't offer as many drawing tools either - I only have 28 (I think the total is 30, if I count some that I resized in order to work with my map size better) instead of 44.

I'm concurrently developing a transit network for the city I'm working on and symbols that denote bus stops, tram stops, stations, etc. would be very useful to have. Are these included in the city pack? If not, are there any custom made ones available for download somewhere on the internet? I tried to import some that I harvested from Google Maps but they are quite small.

My new city is quite large (50 wide x 23 tall) and in the interest of having as much room for my stuff as possible, all main interfares have a rather small width (0.04 km). That'll be fun for exporting... I tried it yesterday and it didn't go so good, hopefully CC3+ will be able to cooperate with my computer and export at viewable sizes (20000 pixel width... hehe.) There's nothing that can be done about the size of the drawing tools, though... I need all the room I can get, and worst comes to worst I'll export the map in sections and somehow try to piece it together in an exterior program.

There will be an extensive subway and rail system and with this in mind, I would like to put down some tracks. Unfortunately, they come out huge (a width of 12) and when I try to resize them to a width of 0.09, the complete essence of the drawing tool is taken away, as pictured below. I know that this is because unlike the standard street drawing tools, they're not one style throughout, they alternate, and resizing it must have caused some problems. Does anyone have any tips?

Thanks.

Monsen

Did you set up your city properly when you started the map? Resizing drawing tools should not be required, and especially not as drastic as you are doing here (from 12 to 0.09). You do know that city designer operates on a scale of feet (or meters, if metric) right, so if your city is 50 km wide, you should create a map 50000 wide (if metric template), or 164 000 if using imperial units. By using appropriate units, the drawing tools should fit your city much better (I noticed that there are no metric template for this style, so you should probably stick to drawing in feet, as this is what the drawing tools are created for.). This makes the 12 map unit wide for the railroad track equal to 3,66m, which should be reasonable.

As for the count, remember that this annual is divided into two "parts". Modern City, and Early modern City. I think they have been just a bit liberal when counting the number of symbols. Technically, the count is correct, but... Anyway, I do believe you have everything.

T6A5

Posted By: MonsenDid you set up your city properly when you started the map? Resizing drawing tools should not be required, and especially not as drastic as you are doing here (from 12 to 0.09). You do know that city designer operates on a scale of feet (or meters, if metric) right, so if your city is 50 km wide, you should create a map 50000 wide (if metric template), or 164 000 if using imperial units. By using appropriate units, the drawing tools should fit your city much better (I noticed that there are no metric template for this style, so you should probably stick to drawing in feet, as this is what the drawing tools are created for.). This makes the 12 map unit wide for the railroad track equal to 3,66m, which should be reasonable.

When I originally started doing cities, I actually did size the map in feet. An old file I have is 30747.60938 map units (in this case, feet) across, but I was doing some reading on these forums about exporting maps and decided to have a go at exporting what I had so far (which was, fortunately, not much) to see what it would look like when exported. I gave it a fairly generous size (15000 x 11701), which is what I use for my own personal files, and I noted that after zooming in as far as I could, there was very little to be seen - it was incredibly blurry. I export far smaller maps for sharing and such a small size would render it even more unviewable than the one for my personal files. I experimented with larger and larger file sizes until they became so large that the program would crash upon exporting.

Fortunately, I had not progressed particularly far and so to quit the map was no big deal. When starting work on a different city map, I remembered what my friend who introduced me to this program in the first placehad told me - he had mentioned something about 50 being an acceptable distance across for a larger city, and since that's what I'm working on, that's what I did. On this one (which I may have to size a bit larger than 15000 x 11701, though hopefully not by all that much), I've progressed quite a bit, and I don't really want to restart it. Resizing the actual street tools was no biggie, it's just the track tools that are giving me a hard time.

As for the count, remember that this annual is divided into two "parts". Modern City, and Early modern City. I think they have been just a bit liberal when counting the number of symbols. Technically, the count is correct, but... Anyway, I do believe you have everything.

Oh, ok, that makes sense. Thanks!

T6A5

Just thought to bump this thread.

I should also note that I'm not using City Designer, I'm just using the standard add-on from the 2007 Annual. There seems to have been some confusion.

Ralf

I'm not 100% sure what's going wrong fro you now, but if you are using a different scale (km or miles instead of meters), you'll need to change the line style used in these tools). Click the linestyle indication (LS: Name of Line Style) at the top and look for the line style "Railway". Adjust the "Pattern Length" to match your map.

T6A5

That doesn't seem to have done the trick either. Perhaps I'm being dense (which is perfectly possible - I'm still pretty much a noob when it comes to CC3) but I put the pattern length as 0.08 (because that's around the width of the regular street drawing tools - maybe I have the wrong figure?) and got the following. I put in various other sizes lower than 1 and they all seem to be very wide, though the size of the lines inside varies.

Ralf

Sorry I think I would need to see the map to check out what is happening. Can you post it here?

Rosemont_Line

I have yet to use the Modern City style much myself (though I plan to), but one thing confused me...

@Monsen: you said, "By using appropriate units, the drawing tools should fit your city much better (I noticed that there are no metric template for this style, so you should probably stick to drawing in feet, as this is what the drawing tools are created for.). This makes the 12 map unit wide for the railroad track equal to 3,66m, which should be reasonable."

Metric template? I thought CC3 didn't give a rat's tail what the user defined as the unit of measure. All CC3 cares about is "map units", but it's up to the user to say, they are feet or meters or km...right? Or am I missing something?

(Unless you meant that in reference to City Designer, which you mentioned in your post - which I'm assuming was a mistake, since T6A5 definitely isn't using CD but just CC3 with the Modern City annual add-on style.)

Gathar

Posted By: Saito S
Metric template? I thought CC3 didn't give a rat's tail what the user defined as the unit of measure. All CC3 cares about is "map units", but it's up to the user to say, they are feet or meters or km...right? Or am I missing something?

I think something is missing. Even if units are kind of virtual, many tools have default sizes, that make everything much easier to use if you respect it at least a lttle bit. Of course, you change all tools parameters, and don't really mind their original values, but it's much more work!

For instance:
- Width of roads, of rivers
- Size of symbols
- Size of sheet effects

(another more subtle point is that it can also lead to rounding errors, which may or may not be an issue. For instance, I can tell that in general, the map styles are designed with imperial measures in mind, and scaled when I work with a metric map. For instance, in a metric dungeon, the grid won't let me draw a 6m*2m room, just a 6.00001*2.0001m room. You may say that is does not matter, I find it disturbing, especially when I want to enter coordinates manually when drawing).

T6A5

Posted By: RalfSorry I think I would need to see the map to check out what is happening. Can you post it here?

Here it is, I hope I did this right.

T6A5

Just bumping this again.

JimP

Is that a 50x40 miles, or 50x40 feet template ? I used the Info menu -> Distance option and measured the size of the entire map.

If feet, that template wont work well for city streets and railways.

Ralf

The problem is that you changed the scale for the map type (going from meters to kilometers or from feet to miles). As the drawing tools are set up for the smaller scale, they come out way too large on your map.

You'll need to adjust your drawing tools. Click "All Drawing tools", the "Advanced" button and choose your "Road, Railway" tool. Edit the propiertes and set the width to 0.03, then click "Outline" and under "extra entity", set the width to 0.02. That will produce a railway line as in the attached map.

Note that you correctly edited the line style already, it was just the line width that produced the weird lok.

T6A5

Posted By: RalfThe problem is that you changed the scale for the map type (going from meters to kilometers or from feet to miles). As the drawing tools are set up for the smaller scale, they come out way too large on your map.

You'll need to adjust your drawing tools. Click "All Drawing tools", the "Advanced" button and choose your "Road, Railway" tool. Edit the propiertes and set the width to 0.03, then click "Outline" and under "extra entity", set the width to 0.02. That will produce a railway line as in the attached map.

Note that you correctly edited the line style already, it was just the line width that produced the weird lok.

• Profantasy forums edited.FCW

Yes, this seems to have done the trick. Thank you so much!

EDIT: I really hate to be posting in regards to this topic again, but inexplicably, something messed up for me again. In the map that you attached, then the railway track has a black-and-white pattern. If I change the settings on my own copy of the map to match EXACTLY what was put on your map, for some reason, there's no pattern, it's just a solid white line with a black border. I literally cannot tell what the problem is, as I followed your template to a point. If I try to enlarge said drawing tool (i.e. the main width is 12 and under "Outline > Extra Entity", I put 8), then the desired pattern is preserved, it's just way too large.

Ralf

Again, please post the map where you have the problem. Perhaps you accidentally changed the line style of the white line?

T6A5

Sorry for not posting the map initially, the idea didn't cross my mind. :-/

If I use the template that you've provided, then the resized tool works just fine. I've made further progress on the map since I posted the problem map initially, though, and the drawing tool acts up on it (the file that I've attached is basically a troubleshooting copy, and not the most current version of the map, so it looks the same as the one I posted before). I've also attempted resizing the railway tunnel tool (since I'm working on a New York-like city with lots of subways) and the same thing happens, only it's transparent.

Ralf

In that map, the line style editing you did for the previous map is gone. Perhaps you continued on a previous maps where you hand't done this? In the attached version, I've changed the pattern length of the Railway line style to 0.1.

T6A5

Posted By: RalfIn that map, the line style editing you did for the previous map is gone. Perhaps you continued on a previous maps where you hand't done this? In the attached version, I've changed the pattern length of the Railway line style to 0.1.

• Profantasy forums2 edited.FCW

There's the issue. I appear to have forgotten to change the pattern length... I fiddled a lot with the settings and I probably forgot to change the pattern length back. I just changed it and now the tools show up exactly as they should.

Thank you so much for your help!