The contest is now over. You can see the winners here.

The community atlas is very close to 500 maps, as well as reaching it's four year anniversary in February, and that deserves a mapping competition.

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.

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 500th atlas map draw, you have contribute your map since this prize is for an actual atlas map, but you are eligible for the other prices.

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 - Ice and/or Fire Dungeon

The theme of this contest is Ice and/or fire dungeons. I'll leave it up to you to determine exactly what that means for your map, but the idea is to implement this as a general theme. It doesn't have to be a dungeon made entirely of ice or anything like that, maybe it is one of the challenges in the dungeon that is ice-based.

It is up to you if you want to base it on ice (in the spirit of the current season), on fire (if you don't like the current season) or on both. I'll leave it to your imagination.

Your dungeon can either be a single level of our mega-dungeon from a previous competition or a stand-alone dungeon. If you map a level from the mega dungeon, remember it has to be traversable from top to bottom, so a level should have exactly one entrance (coming in from above) and one exit (going down to the next level) and your level should allow travel between these two exits without tearing the dungeon apart.

If you go for the stand-alone dungeon, you have to go to the atlas and identify a place to put your dungeon, such as an ice cave on ezrute or a volcanic cave on Nga-Whenuatoto. If you plan on contributing your map to the atlas, I recommend that you request that location be reserved to you in the main atlas thread to avoid two people mapping the same location, but since this is a dungeon, they are relatively easy to move somewhere else so it is not the end of the world.

Remember, if you are short on time, do a small mini-dungeon. Not all dungeons have to be these huge things.

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), the big four community add-ons (Bogie's Mapping Objects, Vintyri Cartographic Collection, CSUAC 2 and the Dundjinni Archives).

No resources outside these, no custom symbols (includes modifications to official symbols) or fills.

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: $50 voucher

2nd place: $25 voucher

3rd place: $25 voucher

500th atlas map: $50 voucher

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

500th 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 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 below.

You 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 500th map draw.

Time

The competition ends March 1st, 12:00 UTC

WIP Thread

Please consider starting a WIP 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 final result.

Questions?

Please ask below.

Submissions

Well, there can never be enough tutorials, but it is described in the Manual, which is a tutorial for the program. I know some people prefer videos instead of written word (that still boggles my mind, really), but videos do take time and effort to make (and are also way more difficult to keep up to date compared to written text). I do make video tutorials, but it is difficult to get to everything.

Sure. If you have them as an image file, just use Draw -> Insert file to insert it into the drawing (Note that CC3+ inserts a reference to the file, so if you later move or rename it, your map will display it as a missing image).

If it is a tiling texture, you can import it as a fill style from your map (Tools -> Import bitmap fill style or just create it manually from the fill style dialog) and you can then use it as a fill when drawing things like polygons.

This thursday I will be doing a new livestream, this time I will look into cubing a dungeon for some more spatial awareness.

Stream will be 1800 hours CET on Thursday, find your local time and notification option by accessing the video below.

Here is a fixed version of the file. I've set it up with a 50' grid with 5 snaps.

Here's the exact steps to set up a reasonable grid:

1. Right click the Snap button in the lower left.
2. Hit the New button in the dialog to define a new grid
3. Select 2d Rectangular as the grid type and hit continue
4. You can name the new setting whatever you want, but it is best that it follows the actual settings, so I named mine "50, 5 snap". I then set the snap divisions to 5, and the X and Y spacing both to 50. What this ends up doing is making a snap grid that has a visible dot every 50 map units (feet), but it snaps every 10 feet. If you feel the the snaps are too fine grained, try setting the snap divisions to 2 instead, and if you have too few snap points, try with 10 for snap divisions.
5. Click ok, and then back in the select grid system dialog, scroll down and click on your newly created grid to select it, and then hit ok. This will make your new grid the active one. Save the map.