🎬️ Videos: Drawing tools for new fills +++ (also watch these for more context: Short video about fills +++ Longer video about fill styles)

Drawing Tools in CC3+ are more than just a list of fills. If you look at the full list in any given map (:CC2DRAWTOOLS:) you'll se that they have different shapes, some have outlines of different widths, some are lines, some are filled entities and so on. Drawing Tools are all manually crafted tools for common features of the current map style, they're not automatically created from the fills in the map.

Instead, to find fills you have imported, click the FS: (Fill Style) indicator in the top right, and go to the Bitmap Files tab. The dropdown here lists all the fill styles in the current map. From here, you can pick the one to use, and then use the basic tools in the right hand toolbar to draw entities using this fill. Keep in mind that when using these basic tools, they don't set anything automatically like the drawing tools do, you manually have to set all the correct properties first by clicking the elements on the status bar, such as fill, line width, sheet and layer.

You can also make new drawing tools yourself utilizing your new fills. In the drawing tools window, hit the Advanced button to start editing. From here, pick one of the tools you'd like to use as a starting point, then hit the New button to make a clone of the selected tool. Now, make sure your copy is the selected one, and yhen access the properties to set it up to use one of your new fills

Normal print size for a battle map is 1" per square. A paper in A4 is 210x297 mm or 8-1/4 x 11-3/4 inches. That allow for 8 by 11 squares assuming the printer don't need huge margins, which gives a map size of 40x55 feet.

A3 is double A4, so 16 by 11 squares, A2 should be 16 by 23 and so on.

1 - Yes. But you need to import the relevant fill styles into the map. See this faq entry

2 - No. The software doesn't have that feature.

3 - I don't really understand. The icons you show in the image are already in one row. But generally, you can do whatever you want with them by editing the menu files

That means it is an old map from before CC3+ (Or it was created from a flawed template that wasn't properly updated)

The default data file location was moved between CC3 and CC3+, and the # symbol refers to the installation directory, where the data files used to be kept. CC3+ has a fallback that it will be able to still display these files, but I guess the symbol import doesn't check this.

Fortunately, it is easy to fix, just run the FFIX command in your map to automatically convert the paths.

That large scale bar is actually correct, it's just that it is a bit larger than you want.

That particular scale bar is 50 map units large, so at scale 1, it will fill the entire map width. But you can use that knowledge to make it the size you want it. Because if it is 50 at scale one, well, then it will be 5 at scale 0.1.

I might not have been spesific enough when I said scale bars should always be placed at scale 1. What I really should have said is "don't apply metric conversion to the scale for scale bars.". Placing it at 0.3048 will never work. But sensible scaling based on 1 as the default value does, so using 0.1 as I described above, it will be one tenth of it's "intended" size, which should work fine for your map. Or maybe you want 0.2 (which then results in a 10m long scalebar)

500px shouldn't be needed if they are uniform, 1px should be enough.

@JulianDracos you are mixing vector drawing entities here with mathematical vectors. A normal map is just a grid of (mathematical) vector represented as as an image. Each pixel represents a single vector, where the three directions are encoded as the red, blue and green channel in the pixel respectively. Thus, when a normal map is used with the distort effect, each vector tells which direction to move the pixel at that position in the rendered map.

This is also very similar to how roof shading is done with CD3 buildings.

@roflo1 I don't know exactly how it is done internally, but I assume it calculated as a 3D-space and then projected down to the 2D plane, and the projection used for the actual distort.

I put it in on Malajuri, off the coast of a small island. The map looks quite tropical, so I think this is the best fit.

The most important point when exporting to an image is to set an appropriate export resolution. Personally, when I export battlemaps, I export them at a minimum of 100 pixels per grid square (usually 5' squares) for a decent quality. Of course, the higher the resolution, the larger the image, so you will often need to consider the tradeoff between quality and smaller file size if you are using it online in a VTT or similar unless everyone involved have very fast connections.

Png is the better format, but it is also about 6 times as large as jpg, so often even if jpg is a lower quality for the same size image, you can get a better export overall at the same file size with jpg because you can go higher in the resolution.

But in any case, you will never get the same quality of an image as you get in CC3+. An image consists of a fixed set with pixels, and quality will always decrease as you zoom in. To a certain degree, that is true in CC3+ too, but CC3+ keeps a set of 4 images around for each fill and symbol, and shows you a better version as you zoom in, something you cannot get in an image format.

Being done with the contest maps (except Quentens, if I forgot anyone else, please notify me as that is an oversight, not deliberate) it is time to move on with the rest of my queue.

So, today's map is Lorelei's excellent Timberline map. Thanks for contributing.