This livestream I plan to teach you all a bit more about combining styles. I have shown elements of this before in many of my live mapping sessions, but this time I am going to make it a focus of the stream, and give a more complete and coherent overview of the process.

We will talk about thinks like setting up your own template that combines the resources from two styles so you can have everything at the ready when you make a new map.

As usually, you can visit https://youtube.com/live/reoS0Mzlnzk at the appointed time (which you should see in your time zone in the left forum sidebar) to watch the video, or use the player below.

I need to open this in a debugger and walk the drawing list to confirm this, but this is what I suspect happens:

Symbol definitions are kind of a separate drawing, and when you edit a symbol, the editor locks you down to the insides of that symbol definition, with no access to outside resources.

So, when you place your self-exploding symbol into the editor window, there doesn't exist a definition for it there. And even if a symbol is set to explode on placement, it is still placed as a symbol, causing the symbol definition to be copied into the definition of your symbol. The symbol itself is exploded, but the definition is still there.

Now, when you exit the symbol editor and go back to the drawing, suddenly everything is available again, leaving you with 2 definitions of the same symbol, one in the main drawing, and one inside the definition of your table.

So, how to deal with this. Many ways really, choose one of them:

• Just delete the duplicate symbol from the catalog. Yes, this removes both, but you can then reinsert the non-exploding original if you want it there
• Before closing the symbol editor window, bring up the symbol manager, as that will just display the definitions inside that definition, and delete it from there. The symbol manager should ideally be blank when opened from within a symbol editor window.
• Don't edit symbols this way. Define everything in your main drawing instead, remember to explode everything, and then use Symbols -> define symbol to define a symbol from the selected entities in your drawing

Saved effects settings are found in @System\Effects. They are regular .fcw files

Drawing tools are found in @System\Drawtools. Each style has it's own folder here, and each draw tool is a .dto file, and if it is a macro tool it will also have a .dtm file and optionally a .fcw (for preview) file.

Effects are stored in the map, so existing maps will have all their effects on a new install.

Try this macro, it is an improved version that handles some problems that sometimes occur when you try to export a map without a proper MAP BORDER (And unfortunately, when you hide all the sheets, you also hide the map border, even if the map has one).

Note that the following macro still have some considerations:

• It expects the map to have a MAP BORDER layer and a map border on it. It uses this information to figure the size of the map and uses that size for all the sheets. This avoids the potential crash, and also ensures that all sheets are exported at the same size even if they are not filled with content
• Sheets in CC3+ can have characters that are not valid in windows file names, such as a slash. Such sheets WILL cause an error message, and can cause the entire process to crash. Make sure to avoid special characters in sheet names when using this macro. Note that sheets with such names may be in the drawing by default, such as "WATERS/RIVERS" or similar, sheet names in official templates were never created with file names in mind.
• Change the export settings in Tools -> Options -> BMP, JPEG, PNG before running the macro. Make sure to TURN OFF the launch image viewer option.

MACRO TTT
GFNSP FName *.PNG
IFERR end
GETLAYERL P0 MAP BORDER
GETLAYERH P1 MAP BORDER
SAUTOHIDEON
SSET;
:loop
SNEXT
IFERR end
SGETNAME SName
GL DName FName
APND DName _SHEET_
APND DName SName
APND DName .PNG
WBSM DName;P0;P1
IFP 1 loop
:end
SSHOWA
ENDM

A good style can never have too many symbols.

• Symbol varity is always good. Just variants of some of the same symbols would be great, like variant bridges and castles and towers and more
• Different races and cultures, as you mention elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, but also culture-inspired like middle-eastern, far eastern, jungle tribes, aztec/maya inspired, bad/evil lands
• How about a mountain symbol with a dragon on top of it, and a volcano and a mountain with a mysterious cave
• Ships and sea monsters
• Windmills
• fruit trees
• a black cat pushing things off the edge of the map
• icebergs
• all kinds of ruins, cities, castles, towers, etc
• a snow and ice fill.