Redraws

rrcalbick

Okay, I've been working on a very large overland map for some time now. I am having consistent redraw issues to the point that I'm losing considerable time just trying to work on the map anymore. I have sheet effects off the vast majority of the time but still end up getting redraws if I try to inspect element properties, or switch my sheet or fill style. These lags add up to a lot of lost time. Yes, I realize this is a CAD style program that is not Photoshop (which I'm leaning more towards using at this point, I mean it's sad how much time I'm wasting for the map to reload). How can I improve this? Make the map smaller? That rather defeats the purpose.

Any suggestions? I'm a bit frustrated here to be honest. Don't get me wrong, I love the software, but the efficiency anymore is making it not worth the trouble...

JimP

Some bitmap fills cause multiple refreshes. A water one I used for the Iso dungeons I made for the Atlas was very bad about this.

Have you tried hiding some of the bitmap fills ?

rrcalbick

No, I haven't tried hiding any of the bitmap fills, which I do use a fair number of to be honest. I'll give that a shot and see if it helps, thanks.

Monsen

There are a couple of tricks to improve performance:
- Keep effects off
- Go into the Speed settings dialog, and set the bitmap quality to a lower value
- Make sure to zoom into the area you work on. The less of the map that is in the window, the less will need to be redrawn
- Hide sheets/layers with lots of or complex entities when you don't need them.
- Don't overdo the detail level. Generally, if you make a continent map, avoid details/features that would only be visible on several magnifications of zoom, that is better added to a separate local map.

HadrianVI

A quick question: Do you use CC3 or CC3+?

If you are still using CC3, then I would recommend updating to CC3+. It is much faster.

I create large overland and city maps with CC3+ with sheet effects ON and I do not have any major performance issue.
Sure, it does sometimes take a few seconds to redraw, but one can still work quite efficent on large maps. Even on vast maps with for example 24'000 buildings in a city map, it takes, of course, longer to redraw, but one can still maintain a reasonable workflow by adjusting to the circumstances, like avoiding unnecessary moves of the mouse wheel.

Cheers

jslayton

One performance killer to watch out for is the use of hatched fill styles in drawing tools. The hatched fill resolves to thousands of entities, which can be a real drag on performance (especially if the hatching contains bitmap-filled entities). I have a map here on my desktop that takes more than 6 seconds to draw with all effects off. When I hide the sheet that has a hatched fill style for forests, the redraw time drops to less than 1 second.

One of the features of hatched fills in drawing tools is that they don't stay as fills, but are converted to individual entities in the drawing tool, meaning that they can't be trivially turned off.

Gathar

What really did change the performance A LOT for me was not to work on full screen. I have a 4K screen, and in full screen, the rendering can be quite slow, and what is more it can happen several times in a row. When I reduced the window size to 1/4 of the screen, the rendering became therefore much faster, and only happened once each time. And it was still large enough to allow to work (even if clearly less comfortable).

rrcalbick

Thanks for all of the feedback, I appreciate it. I am using CC3+ with the latest updates.

I started with a very large overland map and ended up adding a lot of detail, i.e., a lot of symbols and background textures, rather than keeping things at a higher level and creating separate, more detailed maps. So all of those entities on the map, and backgrounds, and sheet effects, are the likely culprit. As Hadrian said, it is still possible to work in the file, some of the redraws just take a bit. I've learned to multitask while working in the file and try to make what I do more efficient to minimize the redraws. At any rate, the map is finished and I've learned some valuable lessons for future work.

I will say, some of my redraws are lengthy, more than 15 seconds, which seems odd to me. Yes the map is very large with a lot going on, but that still seems a bit out of the norm.

HadrianVI

Have you considered using "regional sheets"? That helps, if you have a large amount of objects. On my Vyrn City map, which has over 20'000 Buildings, I divided the city into districts and put the houses in each district on a separate sheet. This way, I can hide the unused districts and keep the redrawing times reasonably low.

rrcalbick

Hadrian, that is something I've considered doing on maps moving forward. As I mentioned, this was my first serious, large scale map in CC3. It turned out great, the person I did it for loved it, but I look back and realize I could have done a number of things much more efficiently. Your suggestion is one of those things and would definitely keep things more organized and the program running more smoothly. I could go back through and work on some of these things but that might take as much time as it did creating it in the first place, so we'll see...lol

Excellent suggestion, thanks for the input! Lesson(s) learned on my part!

HadrianVI

Here's another trick, if you have large entities that you can't really put on separate sheets (like land masses) and you have to work with effect on for whatever reason: Disable the effects of those sheets you don't really need the effects to be one.
I am currently reworking the northern coastline of my world map (http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=6892&page=1#Item_16) and CC3+ got really slow when having the effects on, but I still needed them to be on, to properly see the coastal mountains. So I just turned off the effects for the "LAND" sheet and it worked with a reasonable speed... Well except when I tried to trace the coastline. It took more than a minute to get to the point I wanted to select as ending point.