And, because this is the most recent of your topics to be updated here RS, a quick "well done" on having a second Cartographer's Annual showcasing your maps this year, with this month's issue just out!

This seems highly apt, given the long and difficult journey that has only very recently started to give us the physical world of Dolmenwood out in this reality! Indeed, when I saw your first post here, I thought that was where you were going with this topic 😊.

[Dolmenwood's a highly-detailed RPG and world-setting, published by Necrotic Gnome, as I know we're not all RPGers here. It's very dependent upon magical dolmens, standing stones, magical ley-lines and such like. And of course, it also has grimalkins, fey-cat-folk, as player-characters (amongst many other things)!]

Or try what I did, and which Sue beat me to posting about (😁), which was simply to change the properties of that piece of floor to be the same as the wall you'd already drawn:

There's always more than one way to do something using CC3+; you just have to hunt around to find it sometimes!

1. The style choice is obviously up to you, but the original PDF map you shared uses only very simple textures and plain colours for the hexes, and that wouldn't need more than a couple of texture bitmap fill options to accomplish, which the standard CC3+ overland styles could likely provide.
2. Once you have your source map as a bitmap image (a simple JPG will be fine), all you need then do is create a new Sheet in your CC3+ drawing, for ease call it "BITMAP", and a new Layer, also "BITMAP", and make sure both layers are active (click in their respective check-boxes, if necessary). Then, using the drop-down menu Draw => Insert file simply navigate to where your source map's image is stored, and click "Open". You'll then be asked to click the "First corner" (in the CC3+ window's command line), so pick a suitable spot in your map, and then enlarge the image to an appropriate size, before clicking to locate the "Second corner". Your map image will then be set-up in your CC3+ map file. Once the image is in-place, you can move, rescale and adjust it by clicking somewhere on the edge of the image (only), when the Command line asks you to "Select entities" for whatever command you want to carry out. You will need to check the map scale is correct once your image is in-place, by using the Info => Distance drop-down menu command to measure between two points on the image whose separation you know (flat to flat of a hex, for example), for simplicity making sure "Snap" is turned off, but "Ortho" is on. If the map image is too large or small for the hex-sizes you want, you can rescale it either by-hand, or (better) numerically, by typing the values into the Command line when prompted (and you can just ask it to multiply or divide with the numerical sizes; you don't need to work that out separately).*
3. Not sure why the hex snap grid isn't working for you, assuming you're trying to duplicate the map whose image you showed, because the terrain is shown as per whole hex there, so it'd be easier for you to just work with drawn hex-shaped polygons (created using the hex-corner points in the snap grid), and then place those hexes where required. As long as the hexes are the correct size for what your final map needs to show, this should be fine, and work with the snap grid.
4. Curves can be tricky, but you can simply draw lines using the straight path (or polygon) option instead. You'll need to click to add more nodes for lines/polygon edges to still seem curved in places, but it avoids the oddness that using the curved drawing tools can create sometimes.
5. You may have the arrow cursor set instead of the crosshairs one (crosshairs show exactly where your cursor is using a crosshair that covers the whole map). To change from one to the other, simply press Ctrl + T (and see this post for another option, as well as a caveat on this command's use).

Without seeing exactly what you're trying to draw, I suspect it'll be hard to give more concrete advice than this, but hopefully this will get you a bit further forward.

* [EDIT: I should also note that when you start to import your map image, you'll be asked what file path to use for the source map's image. For ease, it's preferable to have that source map image in the same folder on your computer as the CC3+ map file, and simply keep the "Store the file's path relative to the current drawing" radio button active - it's the default option for this query panel.]

Thanks very much folks!

@Mike: Weirdly, the Ireland maps are the only ones I showed that have never been published! The main Erin one is still one of my favourites, partly because it was done so early in my CC mapping and yet turned out so well, partly because of all the interesting things I was able to find while researching it.

@Sue: I rather envy people who can just sit down and create a map from scratch, or have an idea in their head they can bring to life as they go. I have to plan in detail in advance!

@OverCriticalHit: All these maps were done using CC3, not CC3+, and so far as I recall, there wasn't any other option beyond tracing the coastlines in by hand using that. There are options now that would let you automatically trace a sufficiently contrasting edge within an imported image, for instance, and that would have helped to a degree.

One big problem I had was that with the Near East and Black Sea maps, the areas covered weren't available on any single atlas or paper maps I could source, where there was a consistent scaling and use of contours. The problem was so great for the Near East ones, I eventually abandoned attempts to draw them as contour maps, and opted for the simpler Mercator-style drawings instead. Even on the Black Sea map, I simply had to wing-it to fill gaps towards the eastern edge on the maps I had.

Of course, things get still more complicated when you're trying to adjust coastlines to their ancient appearance using what may be a simple line-drawing map in a published research paper, a sketch-map that may not be even in the same projection as that in the atlas chosen as a potential base map, let alone have a similar scale, or show any contours or other connecting features!

I suspect that because I've been drawing maps for a very long time, at first only by hand, then later using various DTP or graphics programs, the idea of hand-drawing suitable polygons, both of the coasts and the contours, which may each sometimes take a number of sessions scattered over several days, hand-tracing something like these isn't such a big thing in CC. Indeed, there may be advantages to this, as several problems appearing on the Forum in recent times have resulted from traced coastlines having too many fractal nodes along them, and crashing the program as a result. Approaching mapping from the direction I have, means that for many years, I've tended to draw things like coastlines using only straight-edge polygons, since at this kind of regional scale, you can't tell any difference. If you need a curve, you just add a few more nodes. So if you look at the Black Sea map, for all the seeming complexity of the coasts there (many of the contours were done using smooth polygons instead), I didn't have a single CC3 crash while drawing it this way. I did foul up a couple of times, and have a lot of redrawing to do as a result (there may have been Naughty Words said as well...), but that was down to me, not the program!

Should I make sure I can't attend now, so the stream will work this time 😊?

Have you tried drawing either a simple, quite thin, line, or segments (like logs), to make up a line? Use either black or a suitable log-brown colour. Booms would be typically made up of low-lying, floating obstacles, like logs, rafts, barrels, even ships, linked by lengths of chain under the water, and probably fastened at the shore ends by a boom tower, which would allow the chains to be raised or lowered to prevent or allow access, so you could add some of those floating objects along the line too. You could also have a couple of free-floating patrol boats alongside it for waterborne protection.

30 minutes! (With apologies to Sue!)

Ordinarily, if there were a lot of symbols there that your computer can't find, you'd end up with a load of shapes filled with red X's. As there aren't, that doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Have you tried doing a List command using "Select all"? That should tell you exactly what is actually in your drawings.

There are various possibilities for why so much seems to be missing from your drawings, and it may help if you're able to post copies of the FCW files here for others more expert than me on the Forum to examine, to try to identify what's going on here.

The problem my colleague was having after importing the JSON file into QGIS (free software) was that just the roads showed up. I was vaguely assuming that at least some of the available GIS software would have the topographical geoid data pre-loaded, but maybe that's not the case? I'm approaching this from the perspective of having no idea about GIS software in general though! Is there, for instance, a set of said topographical data available that could be imported into a program such as QGIS, over which the roads could then be overlaid?

In answer to Marja's point, judging by the discussion from 2023 on this Forum my first post here linked to, GIS data can't be directly imported into CC3+ or FT3, so could only be imported as an image that would then have to be traced.

Incidentally, a further colleague commented on that ancient history forum that it seems for Britannia, the Itiner-e map has used only the roads known and suspected from the original 1955 version of Ivan Margary's monumental work "The Roman Roads of Britain". This is odd, because there was an updated version published that expanded and corrected the earlier edition in 1973. I'd already expressed concern on that other forum, because I'd found at least two roads known to exist in Scotland that aren't on the Itiner-e map. In addition, it seems the Itiner-e map has excluded at least some British Roman Roads that don't connect into the rest of the network, despite the fact they're archaeologically attested. This could mean there are similar problems elsewhere, of course, for all it remains a fascinating resource map.