If by that you mean doing an inverted bevel on them - I've tried it. The thinner parts of the lettering do not allow me to use a significant (visible) bevel.
I'm happy with them the way they are at the moment, although I may return to them later.
Right now I'm experimenting with the cliffs, after a comment on CG sparked a re-think, and I think I might have found a better way to do the bevel on them - and a better texture to use
Not sure these look better or worse than before, but the cliffs have a completely different form of bevel on them now. I also fractalized the unnaturally smooth outline, which gave me no end of headaches because I buried half my houses under the more jagged outline and had to spend ages trying to uncover them. Some are still stuck half way under the cliff, but that's ok because some are built into the entrances of older cave dwellings.
I also removed the tree symbols that were conflicting with the transparency of the relief layer and turning opaque. That was what was giving me a strange whitish halo around them - in particular the red varieties! So - only green and brown trees left on the map at the moment. I kind of like the reduced colour range - less distracting.
Let me know if you want to go back to the old cliffs!!!
actually, I love this new texture for the cliffs! I think they look much better this way, and they looked great before! They look more like rock now, and they look a lot less shiny. So yes, I think this version is a keeper!
That's really weird Storm. I couldn't be certain between the two, especially since it meant that I had to go and 'mine' the new rock formations for the houses I buried by mistake when I fractalized the pancakes - LOL
Weird, because although I can't see it for myself, no less than five people (including yourself) have stepped up and told me to keep this new version!!! Two of them have never even shown the faintest interest in MC before. I guess they must have been watching from the wings over on Cartographer's Guild. The unanimous vote to keep the new rocks has certainly taken me by surprise!
I've been tidying up the rough edges all day, so there's nothing much to see that's any different to the last upload, which is why I haven't done one tonight
The roads and tracks were all drawn on the top sheet/layer of 8, which is why the shadows cast by the steps in the cliff didn't seem to affect them. So after digging out a few more of the houses I more or less buried when I changed the cliffs, I had to sort them out before I went any further. A basic design flaw tripped me up at that point. Diagonal roads traversing the sheets/layers in zig-zag form up and down the slope were nearly impossible to cut into sections at just the right point without looking like separate bits of road [I]because [/I]of the shadows being cast by the cliffs. I redesigned the road layout (fourth time) to get around this problem, and made nice convenient even slopes without any cliffs for the ones I really couldn't get rid of I hope they don't look too artificial.
Having spent most of the day sorting that out, I didn't have much left in me for anything else, but managed to mostly finish Gyre Frai - the Merlish ghetto on the north facing cliff looking out over the bay, and place two taverns on the top of the island, near the pyre pit and the six tumuli/barrow burials of the early Merlish kings. Had a little fun with a couple of unofficial paths sneaking away from the pyre to the taverns
I've got another problem now... transparency problems with trees have lead me to abandon the bitmap relief map. It was turning everything much greyer and less crisp than it should have been anyway. So now I'm in the middle of hand tracing the respective different shades of grey into two new transparent sheets with blur and blend mode effects.
I may be some time!!!
Something else I've noticed. Since the crash, and the uninstall/reinstall, I seem to have an inferior set of thatched cottages in City Designer. The texture is nowhere near as good, and the transparency isn't as perfect as it was. I'm going to have to uninstall CD and reinstall from a backup DVD that Mark sent me when it all went a bit pear shaped before, and where I hope to find the thatched cottages that I was using before.
I may not upload a WIP today - not enough will have visibly changed to make it worth the server space or the looking at it!
Are the downloads from the webpage up to date?
(Just asking because the thatched cottages are definitely nowhere near as good since the reinstall of CD3)
Loopysue lamented:Something else I've noticed. Since the crash, and the uninstall/reinstall, I seem to have an inferior set of thatched cottages in City Designer. The texture is nowhere near as good, and the transparency isn't as perfect as it was. I'm going to have to uninstall CD and reinstall from a backup DVD that Mark sent me when it all went a bit pear shaped before, and where I hope to find the thatched cottages that I was using before.
I may not upload a WIP today - not enough will have visibly changed to make it worth the server space or the looking at it!
Are the downloads from the webpage up to date?
(Just asking because the thatched cottages are definitely nowhere near as good since the reinstall of CD3)
There is a separate, large, download for the high-resolution CD3 artwork. Did you install that too? If not, you may want to give that a try first. If you didn't save it to your computer before, you can download it from your registration page, under the City Designer 3 link.
Was just looking at the download page, and it says the CC3+ version includes the ultra high res artwork, so now I'm confused.
I will reinstall from the DVD Mark gave me, but the following update (version 32) has both types of thatched cottage, so you will probably see what I mean.
Posted By: DogtagThere is a separate,large, download for the high-resolution CD3 artwork. Did you install that too? If not, you may want to give that a try first. If you didn't save it to your computer before, you can download it from your registration page, under theCity Designer 3link.
That applies only to the CC3 version. Sue is working with CC3+. The VH symbols are in the setup for CD3 for CC3+.
I think the version you sent me on DVD is better than the one from the webpage. I will reinstall that this evening. Doesn't really matter to me if its an earlier version or not. The thatch just doesn't look as good on any other
Version 32
Some kind of vineyard/hop farm seems to have appeared to the east of the summit on the slopes that are too exposed to the predators for anyone to want to live on. Well, can't really have a city without any visible and obvious vices!
The bitmap I was using to generate the relief was making everything grey and more fuzzy than without it, so I replaced it with a vector image (in other words I traced the dark shapes on the bitmap and created a new sheet/layer for them, then got rid of the bitmap altogether). Everything is much sharper now - including the mistakes!
I haven't had time to work on the expected side effect of changing the relief mapping (more intense colours), but I'll sort that out tomorrow.
More of the spider-webbing of tiny pathways has been added, and errors with paths being on the wrong sheet are starting to get tidied up. Once I have sorted out the disturbances caused by the change in cliffs and the equally drastic change in relief mapping, I should be able to finish this off in just a few more days.
I've had to upload early today, because I have an appointment that could really spoil my day this afternoon. The grass colouring is definitely off. I tried fiddling with it to reduce the glowing green a bit, and all I've done is make it a really horrible colour.
That's tomorrow's job, now.
What I would be really interested in is if anyone has any thoughts on the design/style of the layout I've plunked down inside the Sayer compound. My idea was to have 1-2 thousand Sayers living there - the hard core of the warrior army and the senior officers, but it looks like a prison right now!
The temple is just a circle with a couple of entrances, but I have to think about how to represent the structure, which I have already written about - a geodesic dome of glass resting on an inner wall over an extremely important mosaic of precious gem stones (a key component of the story), surrounded by a glazed aisle that runs beneath the flying buttresses that support the upper walls that bear the weight of the geodesic dome.
I have a feeling I might need to draw this and import it
Oh yes! I have also sorted out the really inconsistent shadow/highlight effects on the houses that are supposed to be in the shadow of the land (the contrast was way over the top). I discovered that it was because I had altered the default sun settings some time ago, and put it very low in the sky. Once I restored it to an angle that was more towards overhead, the problem simply vanished.
Humm. I don´t "feel" the positioning of last temple´s buildings. They look "unnatural". Considering how good you did the other ones in the maps, i´m sure you will place them in other ways. Well, just my 2 cents. Keep on doing one of the best jobs i´ve seen with CC3!
Posted By: MedioHumm. I don´t "feel" the positioning of last temple´s buildings. They look "unnatural". Considering how good you did the other ones in the maps, i´m sure you will place them in other ways. Well, just my 2 cents. Keep on doing one of the best jobs i´ve seen with CC3!
I know what you mean. I had an appointment to go to this afternoon, and I think my negative feelings about that particular appointment were running bad vibes through the rest of my thoughts.
Still, this is only the first arrangement. You might have noticed how things tend to get adjusted again and again in this map
I'm not sure about that arrangement up top, either. I wouldn't say it looks like a prison, but it doesn't really look like a military compound either. It looks more like a college, or university to me...lol
As for the discoloring of the grass? I actually like it! I don't know... I don't think it's a horrible color, and to me it looks more natural... but that's just me
Thanks Storm - that's two votes against. Well, three actually. I don't like the horrid blocks myself. Maybe its just the way I feel about the Blucrans - the Sayers in particular. They really make my leading protagonist suffer for being born without a Blucran stripe on his face!
I seem to have shot myself in the foot with this relief contouring thing. There isn't much space on top of the island for things that require level ground - things like more aesthetically pleasing arrangement of the necessary accommodation for about 2000 Sayers, a massive temple, and a parade or exercise ground to boot.
I'm even thinking of running the relief process all over again, but giving the island a much bigger top to start with, so that the erosion doesn't mess the whole thing up.
The grass? Hmmn. I think the land in this instance should be lighter than the sea. I'm thinking of aerial photos I've seen of arid regions. The colouring might not be as bad as it looked to me this morning, but like the Sayer's compound, I'll probably need to do some careful thinking over the next few hours.
By the way - has the colour been altered over at Cartographer's Guild? There seems to be less contrast than before between the text and the background. Its suddenly much more difficult to read things.
I don't really like the buildings either, but mostly because I feel there are too many of them (and they are so huge). From the way you describe those Blucrans, they look like very strictly organized people. To me, it sounds more like one big building for the leaders, some training grounds, and a big number of cramped smaller identical buildings for the cannon fodders.
You know what? You've just sparked off an idea there, Gathar, but you're going to have to be patient with me. I'm still messing around trying to tame the newly psychedelic colours I've accidentally unveiled by removing the grey smog of the relief bitmap! LOL. I might upload an interim Version 33a in a couple of hours, but it depends how long I can stay awake. Its 15 minutes off midnight here.
Oh - and Storm. I was talking about the webpage colour scheme, but don't worry. I was loosing brightness on my screen because I forgot to plug the mains back in when I unplugged everything just so I could pick it up to have a look at what kind of ports I have.
The good news is I have an HDMI port, and a gift voucher I totally forgot hanging around on Amazon - just about enough to get something a bit bigger than a 15 inch laptop screen to work on!!!
Anyway, that's all a bit beside the point. There's nothing wrong with the Guild webpage. Its me - forgetting to plug stuff back in!!! LOL
Comments
I'm happy with them the way they are at the moment, although I may return to them later.
Right now I'm experimenting with the cliffs, after a comment on CG sparked a re-think, and I think I might have found a better way to do the bevel on them - and a better texture to use
New improved(?) cliffs. Hmmmn
Not sure these look better or worse than before, but the cliffs have a completely different form of bevel on them now. I also fractalized the unnaturally smooth outline, which gave me no end of headaches because I buried half my houses under the more jagged outline and had to spend ages trying to uncover them. Some are still stuck half way under the cliff, but that's ok because some are built into the entrances of older cave dwellings.
I also removed the tree symbols that were conflicting with the transparency of the relief layer and turning opaque. That was what was giving me a strange whitish halo around them - in particular the red varieties! So - only green and brown trees left on the map at the moment. I kind of like the reduced colour range - less distracting.
Let me know if you want to go back to the old cliffs!!!
Weird, because although I can't see it for myself, no less than five people (including yourself) have stepped up and told me to keep this new version!!! Two of them have never even shown the faintest interest in MC before. I guess they must have been watching from the wings over on Cartographer's Guild. The unanimous vote to keep the new rocks has certainly taken me by surprise!
I've been tidying up the rough edges all day, so there's nothing much to see that's any different to the last upload, which is why I haven't done one tonight
The roads and tracks were all drawn on the top sheet/layer of 8, which is why the shadows cast by the steps in the cliff didn't seem to affect them. So after digging out a few more of the houses I more or less buried when I changed the cliffs, I had to sort them out before I went any further. A basic design flaw tripped me up at that point. Diagonal roads traversing the sheets/layers in zig-zag form up and down the slope were nearly impossible to cut into sections at just the right point without looking like separate bits of road [I]because [/I]of the shadows being cast by the cliffs. I redesigned the road layout (fourth time) to get around this problem, and made nice convenient even slopes without any cliffs for the ones I really couldn't get rid of
Having spent most of the day sorting that out, I didn't have much left in me for anything else, but managed to mostly finish Gyre Frai - the Merlish ghetto on the north facing cliff looking out over the bay, and place two taverns on the top of the island, near the pyre pit and the six tumuli/barrow burials of the early Merlish kings. Had a little fun with a couple of unofficial paths sneaking away from the pyre to the taverns
Now that I've done at least a day's work adapting the map to 'bed them in' I wouldn't reverse the decision - not even if I didn't like them
I've got another problem now... transparency problems with trees have lead me to abandon the bitmap relief map. It was turning everything much greyer and less crisp than it should have been anyway. So now I'm in the middle of hand tracing the respective different shades of grey into two new transparent sheets with blur and blend mode effects.
I may be some time!!!
Something else I've noticed. Since the crash, and the uninstall/reinstall, I seem to have an inferior set of thatched cottages in City Designer. The texture is nowhere near as good, and the transparency isn't as perfect as it was. I'm going to have to uninstall CD and reinstall from a backup DVD that Mark sent me when it all went a bit pear shaped before, and where I hope to find the thatched cottages that I was using before.
I may not upload a WIP today - not enough will have visibly changed to make it worth the server space or the looking at it!
Are the downloads from the webpage up to date?
(Just asking because the thatched cottages are definitely nowhere near as good since the reinstall of CD3)
I hope that helps.
Cheers,
~Dogtag
With my amazing powers of observation I've no doubt about the fact that I missed it! LOL
Is it compatible?
I will reinstall from the DVD Mark gave me, but the following update (version 32) has both types of thatched cottage, so you will probably see what I mean.
I think the version you sent me on DVD is better than the one from the webpage. I will reinstall that this evening. Doesn't really matter to me if its an earlier version or not. The thatch just doesn't look as good on any other
Version 32
Some kind of vineyard/hop farm seems to have appeared to the east of the summit on the slopes that are too exposed to the predators for anyone to want to live on. Well, can't really have a city without any visible and obvious vices!
The bitmap I was using to generate the relief was making everything grey and more fuzzy than without it, so I replaced it with a vector image (in other words I traced the dark shapes on the bitmap and created a new sheet/layer for them, then got rid of the bitmap altogether). Everything is much sharper now - including the mistakes!
I haven't had time to work on the expected side effect of changing the relief mapping (more intense colours), but I'll sort that out tomorrow.
More of the spider-webbing of tiny pathways has been added, and errors with paths being on the wrong sheet are starting to get tidied up. Once I have sorted out the disturbances caused by the change in cliffs and the equally drastic change in relief mapping, I should be able to finish this off in just a few more days.
I've had to upload early today, because I have an appointment that could really spoil my day this afternoon. The grass colouring is definitely off. I tried fiddling with it to reduce the glowing green a bit, and all I've done is make it a really horrible colour.
That's tomorrow's job, now.
What I would be really interested in is if anyone has any thoughts on the design/style of the layout I've plunked down inside the Sayer compound. My idea was to have 1-2 thousand Sayers living there - the hard core of the warrior army and the senior officers, but it looks like a prison right now!
The temple is just a circle with a couple of entrances, but I have to think about how to represent the structure, which I have already written about - a geodesic dome of glass resting on an inner wall over an extremely important mosaic of precious gem stones (a key component of the story), surrounded by a glazed aisle that runs beneath the flying buttresses that support the upper walls that bear the weight of the geodesic dome.
I have a feeling I might need to draw this and import it
Still, this is only the first arrangement. You might have noticed how things tend to get adjusted again and again in this map
I'm not sure about that arrangement up top, either. I wouldn't say it looks like a prison, but it doesn't really look like a military compound either. It looks more like a college, or university to me...lol
As for the discoloring of the grass? I actually like it! I don't know... I don't think it's a horrible color, and to me it looks more natural... but that's just me
I seem to have shot myself in the foot with this relief contouring thing. There isn't much space on top of the island for things that require level ground - things like more aesthetically pleasing arrangement of the necessary accommodation for about 2000 Sayers, a massive temple, and a parade or exercise ground to boot.
I'm even thinking of running the relief process all over again, but giving the island a much bigger top to start with, so that the erosion doesn't mess the whole thing up.
The grass? Hmmn. I think the land in this instance should be lighter than the sea. I'm thinking of aerial photos I've seen of arid regions. The colouring might not be as bad as it looked to me this morning, but like the Sayer's compound, I'll probably need to do some careful thinking over the next few hours.
By the way - has the colour been altered over at Cartographer's Guild? There seems to be less contrast than before between the text and the background. Its suddenly much more difficult to read things.
The good news is I have an HDMI port, and a gift voucher I totally forgot hanging around on Amazon - just about enough to get something a bit bigger than a 15 inch laptop screen to work on!!!
Anyway, that's all a bit beside the point. There's nothing wrong with the Guild webpage. Its me - forgetting to plug stuff back in!!! LOL