Note that symbols in CC3+ are just standard .png files. To get the right size, they should be 20 pixels per map unit for overland maps (so 20 pixels/mile), but you can also scale them inside CC3+ itself.

Have you remembered to add the Wall Shadow, Point Light Finalize effect? Lighting doesn't start working until this effect have been added.

Happy New Year everyone.

Just a reminder that this little challenge is still open until January 16th if you want to give it a go. Keep in mind this is just for fun, so don't feel intimidated by all the fantastic entries so far.

I've started on getting the maps into the atlas. First out is Quenten's "Bowmans General Store":

It is not possible to call such things from the command line. CC3+ wasn't written with batch processing in mind.

You can talk to CC3+ from an external program using the Intercom interface however, which means you can send commands from an external program which are then run as commands inside CC3+. I don't have a tutorial for that on hand. Some information can be found in this old blog by @saunderl http://cc3-developer.blogspot.com/search/label/Intercom

The second alternative is to make your own XP which opens up a lot of possibilities for expanding CC3+ with your own code. I don't think you'll be able to implement more command line options or prevent the gui from loading though, those things are (most probably) beyond what an XP can do.

One way you could approach it is to decide the size of the average house. A medieval or earlier house for commoners were usually a tiny affair, often no bigger than my living room. Then, based on your house size, so you can used that against the sketch to determine size.

I think it is important to realize Steampunk is fantasy though. And with that I mean, they do fantastic things with the steam that isn't possible at all under real world physics. In many cases, you see them approaching semi-modern concepts (while still being in the Victorian age) but using steam instead of electricity and more practical fuels. So when drawing steampunk, it isn't "will this be possible using steam", but more "does this seem cool and somewhat plausible if we ignore actual physics?" all the way to "this doesn't seem plausible at all, but it is damn cool".

Many steampunk settings uses things like automatons, which are large steam-powered robots, both "human-like" and "this-is-a-big-machine" like. Sometimes intelligent, self-operating, in other settings controlled by an operator.

I like the city-building computer game Frostpunk for it's visuals. It' is basically Steampunk in the cold (concept art) (automatons)

Another interesting omputer game that takes the concept pretty far and some more, is Sunless Skies. Here you pilot a flying locomotive through the void between the remains of a broken world floating as islands in the void. Even the sun itself is an artificial steam-powered contraption.

For overland maps, I think the difference lies much in the symbology used. Steampunk likes to say, "Hey, here I am!". A typical steampunk map would be something in between a modern map and a fantasy map, and would use symbols and map decorations with a steampunk flair. Symbols would look more like the fantasy symbols, i.e. drawn from an isometric view, not the minimalist top-down symbols on modern maps. Instead of a caravan representing a trade route, you would see a train symbol, you may have dirigibles instead of ships, the city symbols would probably have some smoke stacks and visible pipework in the artwork, and so on.

You can run the LISTIMAGENAMESDWG command to do this. It will list all the images in a drawing, and tell you if it is a fill style image (bmpsty) or a symbol/inserted image (pictr2)

You can also use my custom command that list images sorted by addon. Note that the accompanying data file is a bit out of date, so a lot of files will be identified as unknown add-on.

If you use the symbol catalog template, it starts with basically nothing to be able to create clean catalogs.

The WBC is a collection of previous published articles. They have been cleaned up, organized, and formatted for publishing in a pdf format, but they don't contain any new information from the original articles. It's a mix of articles that talk about word building in general, and articles that focuses more on the CC3+ side of things.

There's also some additional tutorials bundled with it which I haven't been able to look over, but I believe those are sourced from the annuals.