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Wyvern

Wyvern

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Wyvern
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  • Live Mapping: Sticky Note Dungeon

    Might be worth mentioning too that we found a minor glitch with the Sticky Note Dungeon Regular font, which has also been updated in the Annual download now. However, being a font, you usually can't just overwrite this on a Windows system, so you may need to remove the original font first (it should be in the Windows - Windows - Fonts subfolder) before you reinstall.

    If you have already done a fresh reinstall though, just remove the font then do a repair reinstall using the Sticky Note Dungeon EXE file, and that should sort it (I have done just this as a check!).

    Royal ScribeLoopysue
  • Invisible entities outside of map on TEMPLATE layer

    What Sue said! (Beat me to it, Sue, as I was almost ready to post my own notes!)

    Plus, if you open one of the example maps from this CA28 style, you'll see there are seven such points on the TEMPLATE layer, so there'll probably be more lurking elsewhere on yours, probably behind what you've already drawn, in the area you didn't select.

    LoopysueRosemont_Line
  • Community Atlas: Barrows of the Ferine Magi area, Feralwood Forest, Alarius

    Having decided to prepare three identical layouts for the interior Barrow "dungeons", the obvious first step was to get a version of the hand-drawn map traced in to CC3+ which would then act as a template to be refilled and adjusted for each separate interior, given their contents were not going to be identical. As the general mapping style was already well-established, drawing this was pretty quick and straightforward:

    The walls are paler than those in the two previous dungeons in this group, so as to indicate their different character to the typical stonework. The semi-tech setting was going to have plastic-coated metal panelled walls (or something similar), hence this choice of wall texture. While it looks quite straightforward initially, the layout here is actually on three different levels - the rectangular pit in the lower-right quadrant has a raised pathway/passage around it, and a trapdoor access from below into it, as well as two side passageways opening directly into it, for instance, and the elongated side-passages/rooms flanking the long, straight entrance passage (with wall slits into that long corridor) have a bridge accessway over the passage, connecting them to each other and, by secret door, the rest of the complex, though not directly into the entrance route. Took me a while to get to grips with this as well!

    While that was all fine, as I was drawing this out, I started wondering about how the semi-tech-world's inhabitants were going to get in and out of here. I'd already drawn-up lists of items and potential denizens from the sources noted back in my first post in this topic, especially the Numenera RPG, and had realized the three layouts would work best with these as workshops, laboratories or a museum. Ultimately, we'll be going with one of each of those. Naturally, some kind of teleportation/transporter beam option was a possibility, for all that felt a little contrived.

    Ordinarily, as explained previously, any segments of the geomorphic dice designs that don't link to the main part of the layout, including the connections off the dice edges, are simply skimmed away in preparing the Atlas version. However, now, I started thinking of adding some or all of those external links to this map too, as passages/doors only the semi-tech inhabitants could see and use. This is a shot of the two Inkwell Ideas Explorer dice designs I was using here to indicate what those possibilities were (from dice "V" and "K", in case anyone might wonder about those letter labels):

    And this is how they were drawn into the CC3+ plan:

    Each new passageway has a wavy line ending it, to show the route goes elsewhere beyond this map, without indicating where that might be, in the semi-tech land that isn't Nibirum. In addition, they've all been set up on the GAME MASTER ONLY Layer, and a series of new Sheets (for the walls, floors, grid lines, and dot-shading symbols), so they can be shown, or not, for each individual layout, something that's intended to be possible via a toggle in the final Atlas version. Each separate layout will have a variable number of these accessways only; the rest will be removed in those final maps. It made sense to draw the set together though, because there is quite an art to doing so, so as not to forget some key element.

    While doing this, I next realised the long entrance passage and the rooms/corridors flanking it probably would be in the original Barrow stonework, not the semi-tech walls. This was mostly to avoid the complications of why the semi-tech folks hadn't wandered off into Nibirum at some stage, and more importantly, why they'd have set up a passage with viewing slits to watch for nobody ever coming in down that long passageway! Instead, if this was all the original stonework by the Barrow builders, simple anti-tomb-robber floor pressure-plate traps to shoot darts from magazines that had to be emplaced before the Barrow was sealed, began to crystallize, and were ultimately adopted, as a concept. Thus the wall texture there was changed:

    Plus, it no longer made sense to have any linking passageways attached to the semi-tech world from this segment of the layout, so they were removed:

    The perceptive among you will doubtless have realised that one other change has been made here, to the semi-tech wall texture. This happened because when I adjusted the new darker wall texture's bitmap scaling, I discovered that, as sometimes happens with the older Annual styles, I had to force the system to use the very high res bitmaps. I hadn't realised sooner that this wasn't happening automatically, partly because the walls lines are quite thin, I suspect. When I did that though, the selected semi-tech texture - the only one that gave a suitably pale appearance - started to vanish into the dot-shading exterior texture in places. This image shows a comparison test, where just the top left room's texture remains as it had been earlier:

    Thus I ended up with simple, solid, pale grey wall lines for the semi-tech areas, rather than bitmap-textured ones.

    Clearly, this is all still WIP, given that the entrance passageway doesn't go anywhere right now, nor have a blocking doorway to the outside, and the wall around the pit is likely to change too, so it doesn't look like the same solid walls as everywhere else, albeit that may be different for each of the three final layouts anyway. Plus everything needs fitting-out and labelling, something which is still rather in-flux currently, as the lists of items and denizens are allocated and consolidated to their respective layouts. Some progress though, at least!

    LoopysueMonsenScottARoyal ScribejmabbottAleDJuanpiShessar
  • Community Atlas 1000th map Competition - Please Vote (Even if you didn't participate yourself)

    As usual with such competitions, there are far too many entries deserving of the top places, and far too few votes available per person to vote for all I might wish!

    I do think it's important to emphasize again that everyone who took part deserves our praise and admiration. There's not a single map here that won't grace the Atlas with its presence.

    And they'll also have pushed us on way beyond Map 1,000 once they've all been added to the Atlas.

    Well done to one and all, regardless of what the final results may show!

    LoopysueRoyal ScribeGlitchAleDDaniel Pereda De Pablo
  • Topographical map of the Ice bed of Antarctica

    Pleased we could help a little here!

    I'd forgotten how much information had already been presented on this topic using the BEDMAP2 data - it was all a few years ago now we discussed it first, of course!

    With online searching, sometimes it just needs an extra, or slightly different, word, and even then, you've often got to hunt through the list to track down the specific item of most use, assuming what you need is even there at all.

    And I REALLY wish I could find the off switch for the dratted AI "findings" Google now insists on stuffing at the top of a search list, given these are almost always pure fantasy (their AI doesn't handle interpretation of factual data at all well, it seems).

    anridiredubh