Thank you, Lorelei. It has been a learning experience. My stylistic preferences have changed as I have progressed (such as ridge line widths for example) which has led to subtle differences in different sections of the city. I like the differences because the suggest an ongoing evolution of the city as it grows. I removed the port on the west bank across from the palace area and will eventually be reinserting it. It still survives in a previous save.
Here is a shot that shows the port before it was wiped out by a digital hurricane. You can also see a fishing village on the peninsula. The houses to the north of the port were laid out with the random street tool. In fact, at one point much of the city was mapped with the random street tool. It was fun laying down houses with the tool and watching large areas get populated quickly, but I wasn't capturing the look of a typical walled medieval city. I didn't realize this until someone else made a comment. Their comment enabled me to look at what I had done and see it more clearly. I had interpreted what I had seen in historic maps and filtered it through my modern American conception of what a neighborhood looked like. I was doing this and didn't even realize it. I cannot stress enough the importance of having another set of eyes look at your work—whether it is writing or mapping.
Added some more to the east of the Old Market Square. Moving into the area where the three ponds are and transitioning to less dense and more field area. The brown structure across the road from the pond and just south of the orange complex with the enclosed courtyard is a granary. This area of the city was once a marsh. It was drained during the reign of King Melek and converted to farmland that was used by the Academy to research improved farming techniques.
I am approaching the wall. CC3+ is sputtering sometimes when it redraws. Last time I hit this I deleted all the buildings in the vicinity of the major port on the west bank. This helped, but now I am closing in on that wall again. I took Sue's advice and started moving buildings to separate district layers. I have many of the buildings turn-off via layers, but with limited effect. I am determined to finish this map and I will. Any suggestions on how to work around this wall would be appreciated (at the moment I have members of the city watch working on a tunnel under it).
Here is a count of all entities. [Image_11753]
Here is a shot of the entire map area with sheet effects off. You can see how I did the river contour. It is a black layer set to an opacity of 12%. Many of the houses have been put in cloaking mode. City residents in these areas are complaining and there have been numerous reports of injuries caused by people walking into structures they cannot see. City leaders are trying to quell the angered mobs. [Image_11752]
Edit: just discovered I had two instances of CC3+ running in the background (for a total of three). This certainly has not helped my problem. I will have to report back when I have enough time to see how the shutdown districts have helped things without the overhead of triple redundancy.
I'd be lucky to have just one instance open with a city half that size :P
I think you will find that it runs considerably better when its only working 1/3 as hard as it was
I currently have too many apps open for the images to load properly on this thread, but having seen your progress before I am certain that once I finish working today and shut everything else I will be in for a treat
Still experiencing some lag during some of the redraws. I will restart my computer later and see if that helps. I don't think the two extra instances of CC3+ had as big an effect as you might think since they were idle. Didn't notice a drastic difference once they were shut down.
BTW, I am eager to get my hands on the new style you just finished, Sue. The 2018 Annual is next on my purchase list.
CC3+ requires contiguous memory (something I was told only recently), so if you've had a lot of things open that will probably help quite a lot.
Thanks There will hopefully be a few domes to come at some point You can make most things with the House command, but anything with a variable concave or convex pitch is really quite time consuming to draw unless you have the symbols to paste them where required. They may only be of limited use, but I'm hoping they will be better than nothing.
I have 8 gig of RAM, so I think even with 3 instances open, CC3+ probably had access to just about all the memory it can make use of. Not sure how hard it was pushing my CPU. I have a i7 950 which is a cast-off from my son and is about six years old. Right now CC3+ is eating up about 2 gig if I am interpreting the list all correctly. I believe it can access up to 4 gig with Widows 10 64 bit, which is what I am running. I think the redistricting helped, but not as much as I had hoped for. I am curious if there is a hard limit for entities.
I think CC3 only ever uses about 4GB RAM, and maybe 2 processors?
(not sure about those figures)
It may be that you need to consider hiding more of those layer districts (making smaller districts and having most of them switched off) and switching off all the effects unless you are about to render?
There is not a hard limit for the number of entities in a drawing, but there are practical limits that will probably cause problems at around a few hundred thousand entities. If your CC3+ starts to behave oddly, I recommend saving your current drawing to a new file and restarting CC3+. This kind of restart can improve performance somewhat when editing a map because reduces memory fragmentation in the process address space.
The speed of a redraw is affected by the number of entities in your map, the kinds of fill styles, and the number and kinds of effects in use. Effects with blurs (like drop shadows) can kill redraw time. Fill styles with rotated bitmaps can cause performance issues if there are many different angles because the system internally generates and caches a new bitmap for each combination of bitmap and rotation angle. The single worst performance-killer that I've seen is high-density rotated hatch fills because they can lead to drawing literally hundreds of thousands of individual drawing elements for just a few map entities.
The effects drawing code can access all of the processor cores on your system, but the main code that handles the drawing list is single-threaded (it can only use one processor core at a time).
Each instance of CC3+ can access its own 4GB memory area when run on a 64-bit OS version, or 2GB on a 32-bit OS version. If an instance of CC3+ isn't actively redrawing and if you're not moving the mouse cursor over it, then it shouldn't be using any processor power.
Thanks for the response jslayton. Once I get settled into an area and won't be moving around much I tend to go with effects on. I know this pushes the system and the software, but with how I'm mapping I want to see the actual road edges after effects. If I am placing roads after laying down buildings (which I often do) this is less critical.
Working on mapping the area along the east wall. [Image_11757] The blue building in the SE corner is a tavern. It is frequented by the soldiers of the garrison. The buildings in the vicinity of the inn are merchants that make their living selling their wares primarily to the soldiers. There is a small barracks for the town watch in the orange structures butted against the city wall. The flat-roofed three tiered structure to the south of the westernmost field with the pond is an annex of the Royal Academy. The building on the edge of the pond is a pumping station. It can pump water out of the pound and also water (from a shallow well) into the pond. I used the Adjust Hue/Saturation (AH/S) effect to make the fields different. There are now three sheets for fields: a standard sheet, another sheet with +12% across the board (AH/S), and another for fallow fields that is -12% across the board. Thank you Remy for your article in the 9 October ProFantasy blog that explains this technique. I will be going through the map and assigning field to these sheets.
I have a question (the reason for which will seem a bit obscure right now, but become totally obvious a few weeks down the line)
Are you using the default CD3B House styles, or are you designing your own? I can't really tell at this scale. I've pasted a few on a map of my own, but I think you may have simplified the style by removing the ridges to keep the poly count down?
Quenten, AH/S is my abbreviation for Adjust Hue/Saturation. I declared the abbreviate two post upstream, but that kind of stuff is easily missed.
Sue, Some of the houses are my own variations. I also play around with settings at time on the fly, especially the ridge lines. I use the trapezoid (9) setting on house shape often to give me better control when butting structures. Many of the houses are a combination of pieces manually placed.
And I'm sorry - I'm probably to blame for the wrong acronym I bandy about when talking about the AH/S effect. It takes a conscious effort to find the forward slash character on my laptop keyboard, and I'm afraid that over time I've forgotten that the acronym I use (HSL sheet effect) isn't actually correct but only a way of referring to the three variables it adjusts (Hue, Saturation, and Lightness)
It works well for both reasons - less visually cluttered, and also less overhead. Each of those ridges adds another 4 nodes at the very least, so in a large city that soon adds up to a very large proportion of all the nodes in the map. If there is a ridge for every roof part then just removing them can halve the node count.
However, I've never yet worked out a way to get rid of them once they are there, so its good to plan ahead the way you have done and make a decision to alter the styles to zero that particular variable if you think you may have a problem with memory later on once the city is more than half built.
Sue, There has been no planning concernning conserving resources on my part in relation to this map. It has been more stumbling forward as I go. I didn't anticipate the size of this project when I started.
I checked task manager yesterday when CC3 starting to hiccup during a refresh and it is indicating the CPU is maxing out and memory is fine. Makes me curious to find out how a new cpu and motherboard will impact the situation.
I'm the wrong person to know the answer to that one.
I have a very broken 4GB RAM 2 processor laptop that crashes if I do more than mess around with a handful of symbols. This is nothing to do with PF software at all, but is the result of the infamous 'Creator's Update' of Windows 10 about 14 months ago (which I only found out after the fact was incompatible with my computer) and the processor security upgrades at the beginning of 2018.
Comments
Here is a count of all entities.
[Image_11753]
Here is a shot of the entire map area with sheet effects off. You can see how I did the river contour. It is a black layer set to an opacity of 12%. Many of the houses have been put in cloaking mode. City residents in these areas are complaining and there have been numerous reports of injuries caused by people walking into structures they cannot see. City leaders are trying to quell the angered mobs.
[Image_11752]
Edit: just discovered I had two instances of CC3+ running in the background (for a total of three). This certainly has not helped my problem. I will have to report back when I have enough time to see how the shutdown districts have helped things without the overhead of triple redundancy.
I'd be lucky to have just one instance open with a city half that size :P
I think you will find that it runs considerably better when its only working 1/3 as hard as it was
I currently have too many apps open for the images to load properly on this thread, but having seen your progress before I am certain that once I finish working today and shut everything else I will be in for a treat
BTW, I am eager to get my hands on the new style you just finished, Sue. The 2018 Annual is next on my purchase list.
Thanks
I have 8 gig of RAM, so I think even with 3 instances open, CC3+ probably had access to just about all the memory it can make use of. Not sure how hard it was pushing my CPU. I have a i7 950 which is a cast-off from my son and is about six years old. Right now CC3+ is eating up about 2 gig if I am interpreting the list all correctly. I believe it can access up to 4 gig with Widows 10 64 bit, which is what I am running. I think the redistricting helped, but not as much as I had hoped for. I am curious if there is a hard limit for entities.
I think CC3 only ever uses about 4GB RAM, and maybe 2 processors?
(not sure about those figures)
It may be that you need to consider hiding more of those layer districts (making smaller districts and having most of them switched off) and switching off all the effects unless you are about to render?
The speed of a redraw is affected by the number of entities in your map, the kinds of fill styles, and the number and kinds of effects in use. Effects with blurs (like drop shadows) can kill redraw time. Fill styles with rotated bitmaps can cause performance issues if there are many different angles because the system internally generates and caches a new bitmap for each combination of bitmap and rotation angle. The single worst performance-killer that I've seen is high-density rotated hatch fills because they can lead to drawing literally hundreds of thousands of individual drawing elements for just a few map entities.
The effects drawing code can access all of the processor cores on your system, but the main code that handles the drawing list is single-threaded (it can only use one processor core at a time).
Each instance of CC3+ can access its own 4GB memory area when run on a 64-bit OS version, or 2GB on a 32-bit OS version. If an instance of CC3+ isn't actively redrawing and if you're not moving the mouse cursor over it, then it shouldn't be using any processor power.
[Image_11757]
The blue building in the SE corner is a tavern. It is frequented by the soldiers of the garrison. The buildings in the vicinity of the inn are merchants that make their living selling their wares primarily to the soldiers. There is a small barracks for the town watch in the orange structures butted against the city wall. The flat-roofed three tiered structure to the south of the westernmost field with the pond is an annex of the Royal Academy. The building on the edge of the pond is a pumping station. It can pump water out of the pound and also water (from a shallow well) into the pond. I used the Adjust Hue/Saturation (AH/S) effect to make the fields different. There are now three sheets for fields: a standard sheet, another sheet with +12% across the board (AH/S), and another for fallow fields that is -12% across the board. Thank you Remy for your article in the 9 October ProFantasy blog that explains this technique. I will be going through the map and assigning field to these sheets.
Can't think of a better way of varying the colour of some of the rooftops.
I love this city!
Are you using the default CD3B House styles, or are you designing your own? I can't really tell at this scale. I've pasted a few on a map of my own, but I think you may have simplified the style by removing the ridges to keep the poly count down?
AH/S is my abbreviation for Adjust Hue/Saturation. I declared the abbreviate two post upstream, but that kind of stuff is easily missed.
Sue,
Some of the houses are my own variations. I also play around with settings at time on the fly, especially the ridge lines. I use the trapezoid (9) setting on house shape often to give me better control when butting structures. Many of the houses are a combination of pieces manually placed.
And I'm sorry - I'm probably to blame for the wrong acronym I bandy about when talking about the AH/S effect. It takes a conscious effort to find the forward slash character on my laptop keyboard, and I'm afraid that over time I've forgotten that the acronym I use (HSL sheet effect) isn't actually correct but only a way of referring to the three variables it adjusts (Hue, Saturation, and Lightness)
Removing the ridges was a stylistic choice. I hadn't even thought about it in the context of reducing overhead.
There has been no planning concernning conserving resources on my part in relation to this map. It has been more stumbling forward as I go.
I checked task manager yesterday when CC3 starting to hiccup during a refresh and it is indicating the CPU is maxing out and memory is fine. Makes me curious to find out how a new cpu and motherboard will impact the situation.
I have a very broken 4GB RAM 2 processor laptop that crashes if I do more than mess around with a handful of symbols. This is nothing to do with PF software at all, but is the result of the infamous 'Creator's Update' of Windows 10 about 14 months ago (which I only found out after the fact was incompatible with my computer) and the processor security upgrades at the beginning of 2018.
So you'll have to tell me how it goes