Thanks Remy. I didn't know it worked with imported images as well as symbols.

That will cut out a lot of fiddling around, since I looked back more carefully at my own parchment-added maps and realised that they were either seamless parchment fills from PF assets, or I had deliberately imported the parchment as a bitmap fill and drawn a rectangle of it over the map. That last option is the fiddly one, since you have to scale it right to move the non-seamless joins off the edge of the map in both directions.

Hi Jerolimoloch :)

It sounds like you have something happening there that might be better sorted out by Tech Support. You can contact them through your account page on the Support tab.

I'm already worried about my cows, Wyvern! LOL!

I think I will try to straighten the neck of that one with the very long neck. They all look like their walking around in circles.

Hens? They'd be the little red dots I added (not really - just teasing ;) )

It was touch and go as to whether the larger animals were worth it at this scale. They really are completely tiny with not much in the way of detail.

It sounds like you may have a line width set that is other than zero. Set the line width to zero and try again.

Don't worry - I forget sometimes and still end up drawing a line around an area instead of a filled polygon.

It looks pretty good for a first map. If you switch on the sheet effects those walls should cast shadows and feel a lot more like walls.

Remy wrote an article on how to show and hide secrets here:

You can edit the sheet effects to taste. Open the Sheets and Effects dialog again, pick the sheet with the effect you want to modify, and then pick the effect itself in the right hand pane. Then click the Edit button and a dialog will appear with all the settings you can adjust. Click Apply when you want to see how your changes affect the map.

Playing with sheet effects can take a while, but time spent playing will pay off in the end when you will be able to tell exactly how you want something to look and know how to make it look that way in the future.

Well that's easy, Quenten. Since turkeys are too small to be more than a dot at city scale, all you need to do is draw a dot in turkey colour, and then put flames coming out of it :)

Need for a bull noted, Wyvern! LOL!

That is transparency acne.

The rendering engine gets confused if the pixels on two sheets are the same colour and decides that there must be a hole in the polygon on the uppermost sheet. The hole isn't really there, but that's how the rendering engine interprets the fact that the pixel hasn't changed colour between the two sheets.

This doesn't happen too often, but when you use polygons of the same texture on two adjacent sheets, and then apply a bevel, or an edge fade inner to the topmost of those two sheets, that sheet effect is applied to all the edges - including to the tiny square edge that exists around each of the pixel 'holes' interpreted by the rendering engine.

You can stop it doing that by adding another sheet between those two (we tend to call it a separation sheet), and copying the topmost polygons onto it. Then use the Change Properties tool to change the new polygons on the new sheet so that they are a solid colour that isn't likely to be in the texture (227 is a good one), and maybe a add an edge fade inner to make sure it doesn't show around the edges. The point of that is to make sure the rendering engine sees the difference between the underlying rock and the overlying rock.

The answer to that one is practice.

I assume you are hand placing the trees, rather than using any of the Symbol fills or Symbols in Area command.

Hand placed trees always look more natural, as long as you don't think about it too much and just do it. The more you think about it and the more care you take the more it looks like a forestry plantation with everything in regimental rows.

Having said that, try overlapping the trees to hide the trunks in a thick forest, and try not to leave spaces that are too regular in other places. Trees often grow in groups or small copses, so try grouping 3 or 5 together in little patches, but in a semi-haphazard way. Do the dense forest first, and then the woodlands around them, so that there is a gradual gradation from thick forest to savannah.

The span of the sheet effect is greater than the span of the rendering pass, so when the pass just misses the polygon it doesn't recognise the sheet effect and doesn't render it.

There is an overlap between passes designed to reduce this problem, but it isn't always large enough. The best way to get rid of most of it is to increase the span of the rendering pass.

Type EXPORTSETMPPP and hit enter. The command line will show you a number. If you haven't ever changed the setting before it will be 4000000 (four million). Type 40000000 (40 million) and hit enter, then try again.

It looks like an artefact that can happen sometimes if there are 2 nodes very close together. It will probably appear and disappear as you zoom in and out.

The solution is to use the SIMPLIFY command to remove these problematic nodes.

Type SIMPLIFY on your keyboard and hit Enter. Look at the command prompt and see the distance set by default. You can enter a new value, or just hit Return again to use that one. Then use the tool to simplify the coastline of the island the line is coming from.

If you lose too much detail just hit the undo (CTRL+Z) and reduce the factor and try again.