Posted By: JimPThose star-like forts were due to improvements in cannon. High walled castled were easily broken into with cannon. But these type of forts on this map could resist cannon fire much easier.
And since those same walls were sloped, that helped in the defense as well.
Of course, when more modern artillery came in, these forts could be taken down as well.
The origins of these star forts come from Italy, the "trace italienne" and were much improved upon by the French Marechal, Vauban, but also the Dutchman, Coehorn (there are various spellings of his name). My first M.A. thesis was on this period of warfare but limited to the years 1702-1711, focusing on John Churchill, Winston's ancestor.
This is one of the major reasons why I wanted the Ferraris style, 10 years ago, but although I moved on to do another M.A. on the impact of the U.S. Civil War on the British military, my original thesis and appreciation of this map style has never diminished.
There is, of course, a whole history of these star forts, the various sieges, the methodology of besieging one, and so forth.
However, these forts could never withstand a determined besieger, they could only hope the weather got too bad, the siege was lifted due to other constraints the enemy faced, or that a friendly army would force the issue, but unless the previous happened, once besieged such a fort would eventually fall, due to the fact that while these were better than the old vertical-walled castles, the batteries of heavy guns could and did tear apart the brick and earth that these walls were made of, along with any human defenders in the way. It was a real science and the contemporaries treated it as such.
I continue lurking here, trying not to drool, waiting for the moment I can buy and download this style.
You're doing great work and I am very pleased to see that you were able to do the walls and bastions ... and I will need a tutorial from you on how it is done.
The fortifications I have done are relatively crude, consisting of a lighted bevel on a white shape and a blend mode set to multiply to let the background paper show through. I am currently trying to work out how to simplify and improve the method. There are limits to what you can do with a bevel, and I think it may be necessary to do the more complicated forts (if you are thinking of replicating them in any way) using shaded polygons rather than a bevel. This is because some of the more complex forts have sloping walls that vary in length due to undulations in the landscape. A bevel can only be one constant length.
Any necessary instructions should be included in the Mapping Notes that come with the annual.
I want to use either "Percent of View Width", or "Percent of Drawing Extents Width" for all these various glows (all the black lines you can see on the road, dyke and fort). They should all be exactly the same in appearance as if they have been drawn with the same pen. The trouble I am having is that as soon as I zoom out to look more generally at the map I can't see them at all if I set it up as the correct number of map units.
The glows are all out of sync at the moment, but I'm trying to figure out which way to go before bringing them back into alignment with each other.
Most effects should be in percent of drawing extents, otherwise the relative size of the effect compared to other entities will change as you zoom in/out.
Some effects, such as glow on fonts may be better as a percent of view width though. This setting ensures that the effects are just as visible regardless of zoom level, but is rarely appropriate for actual map content.
Remy? I'm trying to generate a bitmap image for the macro drawing tools. I've done a png image for one of the aligned arable field tools, and I've saved it with exactly the same name as the drawing tool within the same folder as the drawing tool, but it isn't showing.
It's a png file with dimensions of 600 x 415. Am I doing something wrong?
Should I give that up as a bad idea, and go with Ralf's description of creating a tiny FCW file instead?
EDIT: It's ok. I've gone with the FCW method and its working well
I recall seeing Remy write that the FOREST things are always inserted at their default size.
Edit: looking at the FORESTOPT dialog, it looks like the size can be changed (Unit Size). Silly me.
Edit Again: My reading comprehension is much poorer than my memory. Unit Size is the unit cell size for the placement algorithm, not scaling. Something to fix, then.
FOREST uses a set of varying-size symbols to fill its area, where SYMFILL uses single symbols of uniform(ish) size. Things Filled with FOREST can be faster to draw than those done with SYMFILL because there is a fixed overhead associated with drawing each symbol reference.
Ok - I've just proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that I really am utterly hopeless with macros :P Every one of my macro tools has been written by Remy. I haven't had a single success to my name! LOL!
The orchard is made up of a set of 15 tree symbols that are identical in size and placed in regular rows, so I think that despite the overhead I will stick with SYMFILL and put the right macro in the drawing tool - see what happens.
You're welcome. And don't fret too much over the macro failures, most CC3+ user's don't write macros at all. I am pretty sure you'll have them under control soon enough.
Thank you! You have more faith in my ability to get on with macros than I do.
I think that is all I (ahem... you, I mean) need to do with the fill tools for now. The ESC settings for making hedges and rows of trees are probably better done by Ralf because I don't know where to put them for sure, or what to call them. With everything else I have just followed Ralf's blogs and copied the file naming convention.
I have lots and lots of drawing tools (76). The problem I have now is that so many of them need illustrations that the half finished example map underlying the Select Drawing Tool panel goes through a whole second of green screen every time I scroll down through it.
Currently, I have 2 of everything - straight and smooth. I am tempted to halve the number of tools by only having the straight version of a thing each time. Do you think it is reasonable of me to expect relatively new mappers to know how to switch the tool they want to use to smooth from straight on a temporary basis so that they can draw the thing they want to draw?
No. In addition, I always recommend that people don't edit the default drawing tools, since there is no easy way to restore them if they mess things up.
But you can make things easier with the drawing tools. Remember that most beginners find most of their tools in the symbol catalog window, so when you break down the set of tools to fit in the various symbol catalogs, there won't be so many at once. Also, most of the tool buttons (road, terrain, etc) only shows the tools that matches the filter, so people will only access the full list when they deliberately click the all drawing tools button.
Now you are talking really complicated arrangements and patterns (from my point of view). I think it would be a real mess if I started down that road. I have no doubt that you and Joe would see me through it, but since this isn't just for me and my benefit but for an annual I think I should leave the exact details of the tool arrangements to Ralf - what goes where and what its called.
I hope Ralf will forgive me for just dumping it on him as a big sack of 76 tools!
Remy (or Joe) - how do I make one of those .FIL files?
I forgot to make the dunes drawing tools. The dunes are all different shapes and sizes. The SYMFILL doesn't work well with them - as you can see. If I have the spacing wide enough to prevent overlap in the patches of dunes (they're partly transparent for practical reasons), the single dunes are too far apart.
I've asked you both for so much help today it hardly seems fair to ask for even more. If you can just tell me where to look in the Tome that would be great.
Use the Fill with Symbols (FORESTOPT) command. I'm not sure if that's the right tool for those dunes though, the main idea behind that command is mainly to pack as tightly as possible.
Comments
The origins of these star forts come from Italy, the "trace italienne" and were much improved upon by the French Marechal, Vauban, but also the Dutchman, Coehorn (there are various spellings of his name). My first M.A. thesis was on this period of warfare but limited to the years 1702-1711, focusing on John Churchill, Winston's ancestor.
This is one of the major reasons why I wanted the Ferraris style, 10 years ago, but although I moved on to do another M.A. on the impact of the U.S. Civil War on the British military, my original thesis and appreciation of this map style has never diminished.
There is, of course, a whole history of these star forts, the various sieges, the methodology of besieging one, and so forth.
However, these forts could never withstand a determined besieger, they could only hope the weather got too bad, the siege was lifted due to other constraints the enemy faced, or that a friendly army would force the issue, but unless the previous happened, once besieged such a fort would eventually fall, due to the fact that while these were better than the old vertical-walled castles, the batteries of heavy guns could and did tear apart the brick and earth that these walls were made of, along with any human defenders in the way. It was a real science and the contemporaries treated it as such.
I continue lurking here, trying not to drool, waiting for the moment I can buy and download this style.
You're doing great work and I am very pleased to see that you were able to do the walls and bastions ... and I will need a tutorial from you on how it is done.
The fortifications I have done are relatively crude, consisting of a lighted bevel on a white shape and a blend mode set to multiply to let the background paper show through. I am currently trying to work out how to simplify and improve the method. There are limits to what you can do with a bevel, and I think it may be necessary to do the more complicated forts (if you are thinking of replicating them in any way) using shaded polygons rather than a bevel. This is because some of the more complex forts have sloping walls that vary in length due to undulations in the landscape. A bevel can only be one constant length.
Any necessary instructions should be included in the Mapping Notes that come with the annual.
I want to use either "Percent of View Width", or "Percent of Drawing Extents Width" for all these various glows (all the black lines you can see on the road, dyke and fort). They should all be exactly the same in appearance as if they have been drawn with the same pen. The trouble I am having is that as soon as I zoom out to look more generally at the map I can't see them at all if I set it up as the correct number of map units.
The glows are all out of sync at the moment, but I'm trying to figure out which way to go before bringing them back into alignment with each other.
Some effects, such as glow on fonts may be better as a percent of view width though. This setting ensures that the effects are just as visible regardless of zoom level, but is rarely appropriate for actual map content.
I thought that might be the case, but I wasn't sure. I didn't know about text glows, but will bear that in mind now that I do.
How did I miss it?
Must have had my head stuck in an annual at the time.
Thanks again, Remy
It's a png file with dimensions of 600 x 415. Am I doing something wrong?
Should I give that up as a bad idea, and go with Ralf's description of creating a tiny FCW file instead?
EDIT: It's ok. I've gone with the FCW method and its working well
If I want to save a symbols along line setting, where do I save it? I need 2 to do the Ferraris map - hedges with bush symbols and lines of trees.
Same for the fill area with symbols. Where do I save them? I want to use the trees to make an automatic orchard fill.
The reason for all this automation is that these maps are going to take time to draw, and anything that makes it a bit faster is good.
LOL!
I can't get this to work at all.
The patches in the centre of this piece are supposed to be filled like the orchard on the left.
This is the macro:
FORESTLOAD @system\fillers\CA158_Orchard.symfill
SELSAVE
SELBYP
FOREST
SELREST
Obviously I have it all wrong, but I've no idea what I've done.
With the right commands, it should look something like this:
SYMFILLLOAD @system\fillers\CA158_Orchard.symfill
SELSAVE
SELBYP
SYMFILLM
SELREST
Edit: looking at the FORESTOPT dialog, it looks like the size can be changed (Unit Size). Silly me.
Edit Again: My reading comprehension is much poorer than my memory. Unit Size is the unit cell size for the placement algorithm, not scaling. Something to fix, then.
Ok - I've just proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that I really am utterly hopeless with macros :P Every one of my macro tools has been written by Remy. I haven't had a single success to my name! LOL!
The orchard is made up of a set of 15 tree symbols that are identical in size and placed in regular rows, so I think that despite the overhead I will stick with SYMFILL and put the right macro in the drawing tool - see what happens.
Thank you very much Remy!
I think that is all I (ahem... you, I mean) need to do with the fill tools for now. The ESC settings for making hedges and rows of trees are probably better done by Ralf because I don't know where to put them for sure, or what to call them. With everything else I have just followed Ralf's blogs and copied the file naming convention.
Currently, I have 2 of everything - straight and smooth. I am tempted to halve the number of tools by only having the straight version of a thing each time. Do you think it is reasonable of me to expect relatively new mappers to know how to switch the tool they want to use to smooth from straight on a temporary basis so that they can draw the thing they want to draw?
But you can make things easier with the drawing tools. Remember that most beginners find most of their tools in the symbol catalog window, so when you break down the set of tools to fit in the various symbol catalogs, there won't be so many at once. Also, most of the tool buttons (road, terrain, etc) only shows the tools that matches the filter, so people will only access the full list when they deliberately click the all drawing tools button.
Now you are talking really complicated arrangements and patterns (from my point of view). I think it would be a real mess if I started down that road. I have no doubt that you and Joe would see me through it, but since this isn't just for me and my benefit but for an annual I think I should leave the exact details of the tool arrangements to Ralf - what goes where and what its called.
I hope Ralf will forgive me for just dumping it on him as a big sack of 76 tools!
Its bad of me, I know, but I really can't imagine Ralf being angry at anyone for any reason!
I've just gone and remembered another one I forgot to make, which means its now 77 drawing tools!
I forgot to make the dunes drawing tools. The dunes are all different shapes and sizes. The SYMFILL doesn't work well with them - as you can see. If I have the spacing wide enough to prevent overlap in the patches of dunes (they're partly transparent for practical reasons), the single dunes are too far apart.
I've asked you both for so much help today it hardly seems fair to ask for even more. If you can just tell me where to look in the Tome that would be great.