And now the Sticky Dungeon has been released into the wild, as the October 2024 Cartographer's Annual issue!

Many congratulations to C.C. for this fantastic achievement!

You may find too that increasing the line thickness of the grid may help, regardless of what colour you choose for it. The automatic grid creates zero-width lines, which can simply vanish at some image output resolutions.

You also don't have to create a single grid across the entire map. As long as you use the same snap grid point to start your grid's placement, you can have several smaller grids wherever you choose, and they'll all line up OK. That way, you can have different coloured grids on the same sheet (though of course, that may not work for all, dependent on what effects you have on that sheet). Or you can set them up on different sheets to get different effects per grid colour.

If you need electronic image versions to trace into a CC3+ map, North Carolina Maps may help, if you haven't bookmarked their site already, that is!

It is indeed an overwhelming amount of material to handle from a full set of the current Annuals. The key thing is not to be intimidated by the magnitude of the task - easier said than done!

What I did - and I did something similar to your purchase several years ago, when there were a few fewer Annuals, and I'd only previously had the first year's set - was to print out all the PDF mapping guides, so I could see exactly what each issue was about. The finished example map, often on the last PDF page, is a useful guide to the scale, symbols and design options for those issues that deal with new mapping styles, for instance.

Then I organised the styles by type - Overland, City and Dungeon - and subtype (such as Overland styles that are suited to world or continental-scale maps, those that work well for sub-continental regional scale maps, and those that work for still smaller regional areas, for example). So now when I'm looking at trying out a new mapping style, I go through the guides for the appropriate type and scale I'm intending, and proceed from there.

Oh, and I still haven't used more than a tiny fraction of the Annual contents overall, even years down the line - plus there's always more new material on the way 😁

Yet still no cat... 😁🐈️

Thanks for all the comments, "likes", and so forth folks! Much appreciated.

"Dendorlig Hall" it is then (and topic title amended to reflect the fact)! Please reserve it for me in the Atlas @Monsen, if not already!

@roflo1 - Yours is another fun dungeon generator, and one that for some obscure reason hadn't come up among my Google searches previously. Looking through the list you have there (for random dungeons only), I note several links are broken now, and one of the sites that still exists, Dizzy Dragon's, isn't an "https" site, which sometimes get flagged or blocked by certain browsers/browser settings now. Might be worth reviewing and amending the whole page now?

No thanks, Julian! I prefer to set my own challenges! But this might be an interesting project for another mapper here?

@Loopysue - Maybe just one of the smaller twelve-room dungeons might be a possibility for you though? Might even fit to your creation schedule if there's a fresh dungeon style coming up later this year that will need a sample map preparing, say...

Thanks for the comment re Scott's "Darklands" map too, Remy. I've been checking over the maps and descriptions for the Malajuri area since I last noted anything here, and as you wrote, couldn't find anything suggesting direct links to the surface world, though there is a somewhat "compartmentalised" layout to my blue dungeon map already, which could suggest a possible faction or two from the Darklands might have established an outpost or two here. I'll have to think about this further!

So is this Cat Cartographer 3+?

Dee-licious! 🍳

So far as I recall from modelling the 8- and 6-rad armoured cars (i.e. also from period images and information), the aerials were fixed in position, and at a height above the turrets all the time. These are the early-war "bedstead" frame aerial types, not the later war smaller "star antennae" which were retrofitted to some models, incidentally.

Oh - and belated congratulations on your ascension to Master Mapper status @Lillhans ! Very well done!

When preparing my recent subterranean map of Temple Hill Undercroft for the Community Atlas, a couple of oddities cropped-up when using the Trace command, something I've found occasionally before too.

Thanks to the complexity of the fractal cave lines in the drawing, a lot of the subsequent redrawing/copying of those required was done using the Trace command. When using a fractal drawing tool for this, progress was often astonishingly slow and hard to control. Consequently, I created a fresh drawing tool for the wall-lines using a straight-line option, not a fractal one. That sped things up to a degree, though maybe not so much as you might hope.

The other oddity was that despite having carefully selected the fractal line/polygon to trace in the direction the new-drawn feature was to go, the Trace command then traced right around the entire chosen object in the wrong direction, only at the third or fourth complete redraw settling on the actual segment required. Redraws were often very slow (10-20 seconds plus), commonly blanked the entire CC3+ window while doing so, and made attempting to control the end point impossible, unless this was done immediately after choosing the first point and clicking appropriately. Again, this made precise control extremely difficult. I had the impression that without clicking for an end point, the redraws could have continued indefinitely; certainly far longer than I was prepared to wait.

I've not done a great deal of drawing larger polygons/longer lines using fractal tools, so I'm not sure if this is a common occurrence, and yes, fractal polys/lines can always be simplified. However, if they need simplifying at all, surely that suggests the tools have been created to generate too strong a fractal edge in the first place?

Maybe this is all something that can be improved upon in CC4. It does seem these are elements that definitely need addressing in some manner, at least.