These looks great.

I am not 100% crazy about the placement of the legend text. I would probably have moved the entire complex a bit to the right so you can fit the legend text in the bottom left corner, and moved the compass rose either above it, or reduced it a little bit and put it in the right corner.

That's the way of most things. Supporting old software costs money, and if the sales volume is low, it is a net loss. Still selling old maps that are now technically incorrect also causes a lot of confusion in the customer base when the maps don't match up with the books any more, leading to even more support requests and requests for updates. (Of course, it wuld have been nice if they continued their deal with PF and updated it for newer versions, but they had their mapping software in the lineup [Dundjinni], and the atlas maps wouldn't have been compatible with that.)

The FR atlas was a product commissioned by Wizards of the Coast, and the rights belong to them. They where also the ones selling it, not PF, and about the time when D&D 3.0 arrived and the FR maps had some drastic changes in some places, they stopped selling the FR Atlas with the outdated maps (Outdated if you play D&D3.0 or higher that is, for me still playing AD&D 2nd edition, it is highly relevant).
There are lots of nice maps in the FR atlas, but they are from the CC2 era, so they don't look all that nice compared to modern CC3(+) maps [No effects, no raster symbols, and while technically possible, raster fills weren't really used either]

Other products from the AD&D 2nd edition era was the Core Rules products, which included a product called Campaign Mapper, a cut-back version of Campaign Cartographer, which you could use to edit the atlas map if you wanted.

Setting up a linux machine to run CC3+ is just a matter of installing linux, installing wine through the package manager for that linux distro, and then simply install CC3+ as you would on windows (Wine should associate itself with .exe files, allowing you to run the installer easily).

CC3+ should run just fine on any distro (as long as it is recently new/up to date), most of them contain Wine for installing through their package manager (if you manage to find one without easy access to wine, then it would be unsuitable). Personally, I recommend users just use the distributions they are familiar with (and if they aren't familiar with any, I wouldn't recommend they go ahead. Using CC3+ on linux is a good enough option if you already use linux, but if they don't already have a desire for using linux, taking on the effort of learning a new OS for no good reason isn't sensible, and there are some quirks with CC3+ on linux as well)

Generally, CC3+ works just fine on linux, the main issue I've had is that fonts doesn't render the same size as under Windows. This isn't a huge problem when mapping, but it is a problem if you plan to share .fcw files with Windows users (for example if you wish to download an .fcw from the atlas, or contribute one). See the Wine AppDB

Anyone out there playing Minecraft?

Just for fun, I decided to implement the world of Nibirum from the community atlas into Minecraft. It is now available on the atlas download page.

This Minecraft world was made using a height map generated by the original Fractal Terrains file for the community atlas. The resulting world is a very good representation of the FT world. Note that it is exported using a equirectangular projection, so shapes are distorted in the same way as you can see on the atlas world map. This is particularly noticeable for Peredur and Ezrute

Now, the CC3+ atlas maps do not follow the FT3 map faithfully, it is more used as a loose guideline, and to provide the continent shapes, but many mappers ignore things like altitude from FT3. Unfortunately, generating a proper height map from the CC3+ maps is not an easy task, because they do not contain height data, so I had to go to the FT3 source. This unfortunately means that while the Minecraft map is a very good representation of the FT3 world, it will deviate from the CC3+ maps a bit, but there is no helping that.
Additionally, terrain does not carry over when using a height map, so I did some manual biome painting. I did a rough paint job trying to paint biomes roughly matching the CC3+ continent maps. In the end I did find the result quite interesting, although it can certainly be made better but that would take much manual work. Except for the heightmap data for the continents, the rest of the features are generated by Minecraft as per a normal Minecraft map so don't expect to find villages that match up with the location on the atlas maps, I don't have any control over where Minecraft places villages, temples and other structures.

I do think this map does a nice job in allowing you to explore Nibirum "in person" instead of just looking at a map.

Minecraft Technical Information

This map is for the Minecraft Java edition. I have no idea if it can even be imported into any other version.
The map itself is about 30000 by 15000 blocks, where each block roughly represents 1 square mile on Nibirum.
This map was made for Minecraft version 1.12.2. It was made for this version for technical reasons. 1.13 introduces a new map format, and tools to create custom maps does not support this version properly yet. Additionally, while Minecraft itself are supposed to be able to convert maps to the new format, it seems to fail hugely on this one, seriously messing it up when loaded in 1.13. Things seems to look fine at first, but exploring a bit quickly reveals that a lot of the chunks from the map has been replaced with normal randomly generated chunks creating a checkerboard of new and old chunks. So stick to 1.12.2 when using this map, which should be easy to set up a profile for in the Minecraft launcher (At this point this is also the best supported version for mods if you are into that)
The map itself was generated with a few mods in place to make a more interesting map, but the map itself is purely vanilla Minecraft, and do not require any mods to use. It should be fine to use with modded Minecraft too though (but if your mod adds things to the world, like more ore types, you need to look up the term retrogen)
This map is populated with normal Minecraft resources and structures, so it is a fully playable survival world.
The software I used to accomplish this was World Painter to import the height map and generate a minecraft map from it and then I used the Chunk Pregenerator to force Minecraft to populate all the chunks on the map with the various features (caves, mineshafts, runins, villages, trees, etc) without visiting everywhere. Additional structures where also added at this stage by Recurrent Complex.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots I took while in game. Note that this map is so huge that it is impossible to take screenshots of larger features like landmasses.
You can click any of the screenshots for a higher resolution version (There is also a 30K resolution version of the world map from above, but beware, it is 200MB).


[Image_12165]
A view from the continent of Alarius.


[Image_12166]
Snowy Hills on Ezrute


[Image_12167]
A village on Kentoria


[Image_12168]
Maelstrom Bay on Malajuri


[Image_12169]
A handy teleporter I set up at spawn that can quickly get you to another continents.