One thing that I never was quite happy with with out current image gallery solution was the image viewer. The gallery allows people to upload images in quite high resolution, but since the viewer didn't have anyway to zoom, actually enjoying that quality was cumbersome unless you knew how to bypass the viewer and force the browser to view the image directly.

And after a recent conversation with Quenten, I realized it was time to actually try to improve this a bit.

So, I have now replaced the image viewer that is used when you click images in the gallery. The new viewer loads the image into a regular forum page by default (as opposed to the full window used by the previous one), but in return the general navigation experience is better, and the new viewer allows you to zoom in/out on images using the mouse wheel, the buttons above the viewer, or by pinch gestures on mobile. It also has a full-screen button so you can easily bring any map into full screen view for a maximized viewing experience. (Hit the full-screen button again, or the esc key to leave full screen).

As with the old viewer, there are also back/forward buttons (top right) that allows you to click through all the images belonging to the same gallery album as the current image.

I might do some additional tweaking in the future, but for now, it should be up and running just fine (hopefully). Let me know if you encounter any issues (error messages, wrong images loading, etc). Hope you enjoy this improvement.

If you are posting images in the forum and want to include a link to the higher resolution one in the gallery, just navigate to the viewer page for that image in your gallery, then copy the URL from the browser address bar and paste it into the post. The url should look something like this: https://forum.profantasy.com/galleryviewer/10/18992.

Also, please do remember that if you upload images to posts, they will be resized to a maximum of 1500x1500 pixels, no matter the original resolution or file size, so if you want a higher resolution image for viewers to enjoy, you must use the gallery (The gallery will resize to a maximum of 8192x8192 pixels).

The august mapping competition and voting is now over, and here are the results.

As announced, there are 4 prizes. A $50 store voucher for best map, while the winner of most interesting floorplan can pick from one of the three products gifted by Steve Smith, Cosmographer 3, Source Maps: Cities and Fractal Terrains 3. The remaining two products goes to the two random draw winners with the first one getting first pick.

Best Map

26 %    Quenten - Bowmans General Store
20 %    AleD - The Blue Rose Tavern
13 %    Loopysue - Vertshusen Town Hall and Tax Office
 9 %    Jeff B - Jenin River Whiskey Distillery
 9 %    Wyvern - Cloven House
 7 %    aresnico13 - Johnny Carps Shack
 4 %    Daniel Pereda De Pablo - The Arena
 4 %    Shessar - Pappys Pub
 2 %    Monsen - The Little Smithy
 2 %    IsakT - Verthusens Smallest Inn
 2 %    Maidhc O Casain - Callums Curiosity
 2 %    roflo1 - The Southern Gatehouse

Most Interesting Floorplan

24 %    AleD - The Blue Rose Tavern
20 %    Quenten - Bowmans General Store
11 %    Wyvern - Cloven House
 9 %    Loopysue - Vertshusen Town Hall and Tax Office
 9 %    IsakT - Verthusens Smallest Inn
 7 %    Jeff B - Jenin River Whiskey Distillery
 7 %    Shessar - Pappys Pub
 4 %    aresnico13 - Johnny Carps Shack
 4 %    Daniel Pereda De Pablo - The Arena
 4 %    Maidhc O Casain - Callums Curiosity
 2 %    roflo1 - The Southern Gatehouse
 0 %    Monsen - The Little Smithy

Random

Monsen - The Little Smithy
Jeff B - Jenin River Whiskey Distillery
AleD - The Blue Rose Tavern
Loopysue - Vertshusen Town Hall and Tax Office
Wyvern - Cloven House
IsakT - Verthusens Smallest Inn
Maidhc O Casain - Callums Curiosity
Daniel Pereda De Pablo - The Arena
Shessar - Pappys Pub
aresnico13 - Johnny Carps Shack
Quenten - Bowmans General Store
roflo1 - The Southern Gatehouseg

I'll send PM's to the prize winners.

And while some people will always end up ranking above others, all the maps submitted where great maps. Thank you all for participating, and congratulations to the winners; Quenten and AleD.

Note the following:

• Some people (like me and PF employees) are not eligible for the prizes, in these cases, it will simply go to the next person on the list.
• Only one prize per person, if the same person wins multiple prizes, following prizes will go to the next person on the list.
• If you don't want your prize, you can either accept it and just give it to someone else on your own discretion, or you can decline it and let it pass to the next person on the list.

Thanks to everyone who participated or voted. The contest is now over and the votes tallied, and the results are as follows

Best Map:

Coils of the Cold Coroner by @Autumn Getty - $50 store voucher sponsored by ProFantasy Software Ltd

2nd Place:

The Temple of the Burning Ice by @AleD - $50 store voucher sponsored by @JimP

3rd Place:

Kristol Caverns by @Loopysue - ProFantasy employee, not eligible for prize

4th Place:

The Fire of Lielt'ma by @daperdepa - $25 store voucher sponsored by ProFantasy Software Ltd

5th Place:

Klodevig's Gauntlet by @Lillhans - $25 store voucher sponsored by ProFantasy Software Ltd

500th Atlas Map:

The 500th atlas map was randomly drawn between the maps of the contestants still eligible for a prize. And the winner of this honor was

Fifth Summer Palace of the Winter Queen by @Wyvern - $50 store voucher sponsored by ProFantasy Software Ltd

Congratulations to the winners and a great thanks to everyone who participated. Your maps were all great. I know some of you received 0 votes on your maps, and I hope you don't take that as a sign your maps were bad or feel put of from participating in contest. But the truth is that quite few people voted at all (only 37) which means that there were hardly enough votes to go around at all, and taking into the account that the most popular maps did accumulate a bit more than their average share, this is just how the math works out. 8 maps ended up with 0 votes, and a further 7 with only one vote. So please don't think your map was bad, all the maps in the contest were good maps, but some were better than others.

And thanks to all of you for participating all these great maps for the community atlas. There are several new contributors among you, and I hope at least some of you will consider to continue contributing.

1. Autumn Getty - Coils of the Cold Coroner

2. AleD - The Temple of the Burning Ice

3. Loopysue - Kristol Caverns

4. daperdepa - The Fire of Lielt'ma

5. Lillhans - Klodevig's Gauntlet

500. Wyvern - Fifth Summer Palace of the Winter Queen

Decided to start posting a video tutorial series intended for beginners. The first few videos are now up and can be found in my playlist here:

This thread about Tutorials is one of the curated threads in the Resources category. It contains a list over various written tutorials available. Note that many of the tutorials are hosted on sites external to ProFantasy, and ProFantasy takes no responsibility for the content of these sites.

Only this top post is curated, users can use the comments below to provide links to additional tutorials. Tutorials from the comments may or may not be included in this curated post, so browsing the comments below may find you nice tutorials in addition to this list.

Use the Flag link to report out-of-date links in this topic, for example removed tutorials or pages that now post inappropriate content and should be removed from the list. Don't use it to suggest additions.

Video tutorials have their own topic.

Official Material

There are quite a lot of tutorials in the official documentation. Most of these are pdf files you can find in the Documentation directory inside your CC3+ data directory.

A significant portion of the CC3+ program manual are tutorials for how to do things in CC3+, these tutorials mostly use overland mapping as an example, but they do teach you a lot of useful things even if you will primarily be doing other kinds of maps, like dungeons.

Almost all the products/add-ons comes with an Essentials guide which gives you a brief quick start into that product with a short introductory tutorial.

The annuals are not just a great source of new styles and symbols, but each individual issue comes with a mapping guide for that style. Even if you don't plan to use that style, these guides often end up teaching you additional tips and tricks useful for your other mapping.

The Tome of Ultimate Mapping contains various tutorials for almost every one of ProFantasy's products. Just as with the user manual, tutorials may still be helpful even if they are for a different type of map since the basic way of doing things in CC3+ doesn't change between overland and dungeon and city maps.

The ProFantasy Blog contains a lot of useful articles, many of which take a tutorial format.

Tutorials

• Command of the Week archive & Monsen's Blog Article Index
• ProFantasy User Tutorial page
• Beveled Mountains
• Exporting CC3+ maps to MapTool/Roll 20
• Joachim's Macro Tutotorials
• Paper Curls
• Robin's Tutorials
• Shessar's Battlemap Tutorials
• Shessar's Overland Mountain Tutorial
• Wrapping pattern fills on Per3 walls
• Deepzoom images for web
• How to get PALEO DEMs into FT3(+)
• How to create decorative symbols by tracing

Remy Monsen here, hailing from the cold shores of the Icy North. Well, something like that anyway, depending on your own location.

Born back in 1976, I am currently 44 years old (and since I am going to forget to update this, I leave it to you to calculate the new value based on my birth year as time goes on). Currently (and always has been) living in the city of Bergen on the west coast of Norway.

I am mostly an IT-guy, and having been that since my young days. I got my first computer when I was about 8, a Commodore 64, and I was immediately in love with what you could do with a computer once you learned how to program on it. Most of my work and studies through the years have been IT-related. Among other things, I was an officer in the Royal Norwegian Navy for 7 years, managing and supporting IT systems. And now I am an Assistant Professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, teaching stuff like networking and software development.

I first got interested in the ProFantasy products during the 90's when looking at the ads in Dragon magazine, I was so mesmerized over how good that looked compared to my hand drawn attempts (drawing is NOT my strong suit), and I needed maps for my RPG campaign which I DM'ed. Well, they where too expensive for a penniless high-schooler back then, and my computer was an Amiga 500, while the ProFantasy stuff required a PC, so it wasn't really available for me back then. I do remember getting more and more enticed by it as the ads started to expand, and then showed up in color.
It wasn't until I started my career as a naval officer that I actually got my first computer and the money to buy software. I have to admit, it took me a while to get to properly know CC2. My main use cases was dungeons back then. I was DM'ing in the Forgotten Realms game world, and I had all the overland maps I needed provided by the campaign setting itself. But as many others, I had a bit of an issue getting CC2 to do what I needed, so I often fell back to simpler tile-based mappers, which allowed me to create a decent map in a few minutes. I did get tired of these simple mappers though, they never was able to make what I really wanted. so I kept coming back to CC2 and experiment with it. But it wasn't until the day I sat down and more or less read Allyn's excellent Tome of Ultimate Mapping from cover to cover, working through every single tutorial in there that I really got CC2. After that, I never looked back. Today, I am the maintainer of the Tome, and I hope everyone who owns it finds it as useful as I found it back then. There are still traces of Allyn's original tome in there, but I have rewritten most of it, to ensure it is a relevant resource to modern Campaign Cartographer 3+. Lots of the old tricks from the CC2 days are no longer need. For example, back then, we didn't have effects, so we had to make outlines on the text manually. Back then, that was a highly useful technique for making text readable, today it is only used for very special cases.

I am the maintainer of the Community Atlas Project, a collaborative project where we all build a world together. I encourage everyone to come along and help with the project by submitting maps, you don't have to be a pro. You can read more about the project here.

I also have my own YouTube channel where I post CC3+ tutorials, as well as write blog entries for the ProFantasy Blog.

As for my own mapmaking, most of my maps are made for use in my own campaign. I am a Dungeon Master, and after getting tired with the published worlds out there, I decided it would be much more fun to make my own, so I made the World of Virana, where I run my players through their adventures. I have a wiki for the world, but since my games are face-to-face, I am not good at updating it to often. You'll find a subset of my maps there. I also try to put my maps into the community atlas at the same time if I can find a good spot for them, nothing better than getting the atlas expanded at the same time when I am making a map anyways.

View from my house and view of my city (city pic does not cover the area where I live, I live a bit outside the main city)

We just passed 1200 maps in the Community Atlas Project. Congrats to @Ricko for submitting the 1200th map.

To show off all the maps in the collection, I've made a new version of the montage. Note that this one is quite large, I made it in 8K resolution (7680x4320). It is in 16:9 aspect ratio, so it should fit the most common ratio used for computer monitors if anyone wants to use it as a background image or similar, but in that case, to avoid wasting memory, I recommend resizing it to your actual monitor resolution.

Of course, even at 8K, each map get quite small, so the best way to admire the maps is still to head over to the atlas site and either look at the images, or download the actual atlas and open the maps in CC3+.

The full size image can't be embedded in this post, but you can either find it in my gallery here in the forum, or download it from my website.

My order of the 10th Anniversary Edition of Cats of Catthulhu arrived this morning. No idea when I am actually going to get to play it, but it looks fun:

But the main reason for making this post is to share a nice little detail about the book with you all. Because on page 51 of the main book, we can find this guy:

Yup, that's my cat Jack, ready for adventure in the world of Catthulhu. So, not only do he find his way into my livestreams and meetings, but he is now in an actual published RPG book.

(If anyone likes puzzle games, his image can also be found in the computer game "Cats Love Boxes" released on Steam last year.)

(Note that I am not affiliated with neither the mentioned RPG nor video game, and unfortunately Jack does not earn any royalties either for his appearances.)

All we need now is a cat-themed mapping style so I can make maps for this game.

The community atlas is closing in on 1000 maps, and it is time to celebrate this occasion with a fun competition. So come on in, join the competition, have fun, and maybe even win a prize for your effort. Everyone is welcome.

All skill levels

As always, this competition is open to all skill levels. Please don't think you have to be a master mapper to compete. A competition is a great way of testing yourself and have some fun. Everyone is welcome here, and while some of the prizes are dedicated to the best maps, there is an option for anyone who competes to win.

Set in the Atlas - No contribution required

As always, the competition is set in the community atlas, but the competition is open for anyone, even if they do not want to contribute to the atlas. Of course, I hope as many as possible will contribute, and if you wish to contribute, you have to provide me with the .fcw file. I assume everyone who posts their .fcw file here will contribute, if you don't want to contribute, simply don't provide the .fcw file. Note that to be part of the 1000th atlas map draw, you have contribute your map since this prize is for an actual atlas map, but you are still eligible for the other prices even if you don't.

Do the map you have time for

I know people are busy, but keep in mind that competitions, especially with prizes, doesn't come around all the time. If you do have time to do your very best for the competition, that's great, but if you are short on time, consider doing either a smaller or simpler map.

Remember, competitions are held because people participate, without participants, there won't be competitions either. Not trying to guilt trip anyone into participating, if you truly don't have the time, that's completely fine, but I am hoping people can try to find the time to at least do something small and simple rather than pass over the competition completely.

The Competition - Villages of the World

Allowed Resources

To keep this fair to everyone, the allowed resources are the same as for any atlas map. In simple words, that means any official CC3+ add-on from ProFantasy (including the mini add-ons downloadable from the registration page such as Shessar's Fireplaces and Scott's Celtic Buildings as well as the free monthly symbols), as well as the community add-ons listed under in the "Free Addons" section on this page (but not the Free Artwork further down).

No resources outside these, no custom symbols (includes modifications to official symbols), fills or images (included images exported from another CC3+ map).

The maps have to be made in CC3+ only, no pre/post production in an image editor or similar.

Prizes

The prizes will be vouchers for ProFantasy products. Remember, if you already have all the products, these make excellent gifts to friends who could use CC3+ or just save them for the next product.

Best map: $75 voucher

2nd place: $50 voucher

3rd place: $25 voucher

1000th atlas map: $50 voucher

Best map and runners up will be determined by community vote.

1000th atlas map will be randomly drawn between the submitted maps, so the order they are submitted to me does not matter. You have to submit your .fcw file for inclusion in the atlas to be eligible for this one.

While you can submit multiple maps to the competition, each individual participant will only be eligible for one prize.

Thanks to ProFantasy for sponsoring the prizes.

Entering the Competition

Please indicate that you want to enter the competition by posting your claim to any unmapped village in the atlas below.

To complete your entry you then post the image of your final map in this thread when it is done. Feel free to also post a high resolution version in your personal gallery on the forum.

To contribute your final map to the atlas, you must also attach your .fcw file for the map along with the map image. This is required to participate in the 1000th map draw. but you'll still be eligible for the best map prizes if you don't want to submit to the atlas. I am going to assume that if you post your fcw,  you want it included in the atlas.

Time

The competition ends October 1st 2024, 12:00 UTC

WIP Thread

Please consider starting a Work In Progress thread in the forum showing your progress. You can post a link to your WIP thread in this thread. Please do not use this thread as a WIP thread though, it is reserved for competition discussion and posting of the submissions.

Questions?

Please ask below.

Participants

It is also worth to remember that in many jurisdictions companies are actually required to defend their patents and copyrights, if they don't it may result in it being invalidated in the future.

So even the friendliest company around WILL usually send cease and desist letters even to smaller actors, simply to show that they are defending their copyright and not ignoring it. Some people misconstruct this as treating their fanbase badly, but it is simply a required action to prevent third parties going to court and demanding it being invalidated because there a multiple parties using it, and it therefore cannot belong to a single company.

This is basically why asking first is the best idea, because if they have given you permissions, they don't risk getting into trouble themselves in the future.