The Screen
Monsen
Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
Just posted a new blog entry about the screen.
I often get maps for the community atlas where people haven't properly expanded the screen to cover things that end up outside the map border, so perhaps this is a good read for some.
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Comments
Somebody ought to write an AUTOSCREEN command that will create an appropriately-sized screen!
Hopefully I have never made that mistake.
Joe, that sounds like an excellent idea.
@jslayton Is there an easy way to calculate the extent of the effects? Automatically making a polygon that fits between the map border and extents shouldn't be too difficult I think, but I don't know how to actually figure out the extent of the result of the effects.
There isn't a generalized way to ask effects for their area of effect (you'd have to pry apart the effects data and determine that by effect type). It's on the list of things to do, it's just not there yet.
Something that would get rid of the old screen and create a new one just based on the existing map border and any projecting entities is probably good enough for most folks (please use the SDK tools in BorderUtils.h to work with map border size things if you're going to be doing code for this).
An option to make a screen for an arbitrary rectangle and size would be a good starting point and might be useful for other things as well.
@jslayton wrote:
please use the SDK tools in BorderUtils.h to work with map border size things if you're going to be doing code for this
You'll have to produce a new dev toolkit then, as I don't have access to BorderUtils.h
There is a further complication in terms of computing the area affected by Effects, because I (and I think others, from previous Forum comments) sometimes expand certain terrain fill polygons (and other items) significantly beyond the map border so as not to have the map's frame/edge/border become the edge-of-the-world due to Effects such as Edge Fade which is often applied to their Sheets.
Personally, I commonly just add suitable white rectangles onto the Screen Sheet to cover wherever any terrain polygon extends beyond the map border, rather than redrafting the entire Screen, as that often simply isn't necessary. This also applies to those Glow Effects that can extend outside the original Screen, which of course is where the size of such an Effect becomes important.
EDIT: Forgot to say this before posting earlier...
If I need to add a new screen polygon, I usually just create a white rectangle on the Screen Sheet large enough to hide everything that extends beyond the map border (so hiding the whole map too), and then either create a smaller rectangle of the size of the map within the border (or just use a copy of the map's border rectangle transferred to the Screen Sheet), and then do a Multipoly command on those entities. Obviously, having done that, the new screen is fixed and can't be adjusted, only replaced entirely, so it tends to be the last thing I do. It's probably no quicker or easier than the polygon shape Remy describes in the blog, but as ever with CC3+, it does demonstrate again there are often multiple ways to achieve a similar end result with the program.
I thought about the multipoly option when writing the blog, but left it out since it can't be edited. Using Stretch makes it extremely easy to expand the current screen, so I prefer that over adding a new polygon, but of course, editing it is impossible if it is a multipoly.
The shape from the blog is the standard that ProFantasy uses for their templates. It can be drawn very quickly if you are using Snap, so while it looks complicated, it is easier to draw than throwing in four rectangles if you want to cover all sides.
Might be worth saying here as well that Remy's latest "Quickie" video demonstrates the use of the Stretch command, including how to stretch the Screen correctly; just watched it myself is how I know now! Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCcKavGdABU
Yea, I recored that video spesifically so I could link it from the blog article.
I probably left out the XT_Common stuff from the last one, then (BorderUtils.h dates back to 2015).
When I was working on trimming the contour outlines to the map border for several of my maps and making new polygons for the contours, occasionally the "draw path" would interact with the screen instead of the outline I was working with. Once I accidentally deleted one of the interior corners, so the screen hid half the map and only showed a trianglular section. I found it best to simply hide the Screen sheet while I was doing that kind of work.
Hi Confutus :)
If the screen is also on a Layer called SCREEN you can freeze the layer and prevent those interactions.