So finally, these maps have now been sent of to Remy for inclusion in the Atlas. Nothing much to add to what was last mentioned here about them, although for those interested, the three PDF files of notes for the set are here:

Too late to be of much use now, I realise. However, dashed lines, even when you've adjusted the settings to give suitable lines and spaces, often need minor tweaks after drawing them, as has been mentioned already. As Sue said, simply adjusting one node on the line by a few pixels is often enough to stop the unwanted "looong" line segment, or occasionally removing one node, although I find the line adjustment method is more reliable, and easier to correct. Of course, you have to check the whole line, because correcting one spot may create problems elsewhere. So again, I often draw any lines like this in shorter stretches, to keep such difficulties within manageable limits.

The problem seems to be commoner when you have a couple of nodes quite close together in one part of the line, so again as Sue suggested, keeping the number of nodes overall as low as practical, will likely help. (Except when it doesn't, of course 😉!)

I have quite a few of the earliest items in this line, going back to the later 1970s. The earliest were some sheets of square floor tiles and wooden planks printed on card that you had to physically cut up to use. They weren't tiles as such, you just had to cut them to whatever corridor size and shapes you wanted. That's where the concept of geomorphs probably originated, to make best use of things like this. There were a few other bits and pieces with that, including a cut-up stone stair sheet, both straight and spiral, and some wooden doors. They were printed with a single colour per sheet, and good-quality, black, hand-drawn lines to show the texture. One of the stone colours was cream, with neatly-drawn, square and rectangular sub-tiles per 5-ft square (scaled for 25mm/28mm minis back then), the other stone was grey with numerous small "crazy-paving" style pieces per floor square, and a few bits missing to show it as "worn and very old", the stairs were grey with wavy-edged steps, so as to have a bit of character, and the wood doors and planking done in a pleasing red-brown. Can't recall who made them now; might have been the original Games Workshop - they were certainly the UK sellers.

Then in the early(-ish?) 1980s, I bought up a full set of the Steve Jackson Games "Cardboard Heroes" range of A-frame standee card minis, which also had to be physically cut-up from their full-colour-printed sheets, and which had a huge array of mini options for characters, monsters and all manner of flat-lain items. You can still buy these now, but as downloadable PDFs to print at home. They're still excellent, as the artwork quality was uniformly splendid, and at the time nobody else was making things like this. Spoilt for choice in home-print options these days, of course!

About the same time, I found a booklet called "The Compleat Tavern", published by Gamelords in 1981. This provided a whole array of tables and rules for running events of all kinds in taverns and bars in fantasy RPGs. Main reason I got it was because it had a loose foldout tavern plan printed on thick paper (mono printing on cream paper), which again came with cut-up sheets of items like tables, chairs, benches, etc, printed brown on darker cream thin card.

Subsequent to that was a set of pull-out and cut-up printed item sheets in an issue of either "Dragon" or "Dungeon" (the TSR in-house magazines of the period), which were simply printed black on flat-lain small rectilinear tile-shapes, suitable for the items involved (jars, barrels, chests, etc.). Can't recall what date that was now, but from the basic print-style, I'd guess sometime in the 1980s.

And lots more since, naturally, though I didn't come across anything quite like these 1984 pieces. Being in the UK though, getting hold of anything published in the States was often very difficult, and commonly expensive.

When preparing my recent subterranean map of Temple Hill Undercroft for the Community Atlas, a couple of oddities cropped-up when using the Trace command, something I've found occasionally before too.

Thanks to the complexity of the fractal cave lines in the drawing, a lot of the subsequent redrawing/copying of those required was done using the Trace command. When using a fractal drawing tool for this, progress was often astonishingly slow and hard to control. Consequently, I created a fresh drawing tool for the wall-lines using a straight-line option, not a fractal one. That sped things up to a degree, though maybe not so much as you might hope.

The other oddity was that despite having carefully selected the fractal line/polygon to trace in the direction the new-drawn feature was to go, the Trace command then traced right around the entire chosen object in the wrong direction, only at the third or fourth complete redraw settling on the actual segment required. Redraws were often very slow (10-20 seconds plus), commonly blanked the entire CC3+ window while doing so, and made attempting to control the end point impossible, unless this was done immediately after choosing the first point and clicking appropriately. Again, this made precise control extremely difficult. I had the impression that without clicking for an end point, the redraws could have continued indefinitely; certainly far longer than I was prepared to wait.

I've not done a great deal of drawing larger polygons/longer lines using fractal tools, so I'm not sure if this is a common occurrence, and yes, fractal polys/lines can always be simplified. However, if they need simplifying at all, surely that suggests the tools have been created to generate too strong a fractal edge in the first place?

Maybe this is all something that can be improved upon in CC4. It does seem these are elements that definitely need addressing in some manner, at least.

Resuming where we left off, the next phase was to add the external segment at the map's right side. Rather than redraw that, I simply copied and pasted what was required from the Snakeden Hollow map, added, and in some cases amended, the relevant sheet effects to better fit this different map-view scaling, and adjusted the cliff to be a simple line, separating interior from exterior.

The vegetation looks a bit sparse there now, so that may need adjusting too later on. I also had to add an extra mask segment to hide the wall shadow from the new cliff line near the top, where it was showing on the interior of the rock. Other tweaks seemed likely as well, but I wanted to get on with the complexities of the internal layout, so switched to that.

Which brings us to something of a hiatus in screenshots, because this process turned out to be a lot more complex than expected. Looks great as a simple hand-sketched view - five minutes to draw that... Yeah, right! Basically, it turned into two full sessions spread across a couple of days, with a lot of switching and changing, during which I completely forgot I was meant to be recording such things as I went along.

So, imagine a burst of gentle harp-music, water-on-glass visuals, as we fade back to where this got me finally:

Main obvious change, aside from the range of new features, is that the interior floor colouring has been darkened. At the same time, much of the internal wall shadows have been reduced significantly, while still helping to differentiate the various levels in a more subtle way than the original shadows. In practical terms though, the whole interior floor has been redrawn as separate pieces, because it proved impossible to retain the complete original floor even for the lower part (darker, extensive, left-hand segment, except the darkest cave's floor there). That was largely because of the glows on each floor element, and the stair symbols, interfering with one another. Several now have separator sheets and underlying mask polygons added, to further help keep things clean.

At which point, I remembered I should have been taking more screenshots, so here's one where the changes are so subtle you may be hard-pressed to spot them:

The well's been added as a first test for how the internal lower symbols would look (lower right, on yet another new sheet) and the basal shadows for the two sets of stairs in the darker leftward part of the drawing have gone. Well, masked now, at least, to look less steep-drop-floaty!

It was about this point I stood-back and examined the map as a whole for once, always useful in the latter stages, to see how things are working together as a complete map, not just how individual bits are holding up when zoomed-right in to fine-tune things. Which made me realise I was struggling to differentiate between the separate internal solid wall blocks and the floor levels. Thus with a few clicks, the interior rock colouring was changed to:

Some further amendments have been made as well. The tunnel through the raised floor in the large right-side cavern has been added (no, it hadn't been forgotten, although earlier I had forgotten the steps up on the south side of that extended raised platform, leading to the rounded cavern at its end, during the unrecorded mapping sessions). The other changes are likely too subtle to be spotted, adding masking patches to tone-down the upper-level shadowing glow by the three small drop-lines at the cave-mouths in the left-hand section. I tested a similar idea on the longer ledges as well, but felt those looked better without them in the end - as they are here. That mild shadowing suggests a slight dip towards the drop-line that seems to help fool the eye better.

With that all completed, it was time to start adding some symbols to give a little more life to the whole, as well as a scaling grid for the interior (I decided against adding one for the outside too, as this is really a map of the interior, after all). A couple of sloping-passage arrows were added along the way:

The wall shadows mask had to be extended to hide unwanted bits of the grid, although because the original mask followed the complexities of the fractal cave wall, that proved unworkably slow and impossible to control by the normal node-editing processes, so fresh patches of suitably-coloured polygons were dropped-in instead. After which (higher-res map now - must be approaching the end!) it was time to break-out the labels, north pointer, etc.:

Plus a decorative SS2 Lizardman. And sans grid:

On the CC3+ version, these labels all looked fine and clear. As soon as these JPG test versions were done, it was obvious the labels weren't working nearly so nicely. I also didn't like the faintness of the scale square here. So more changes followed to reach these final versions (unless I decide otherwise before submission to the Atlas, anyway!), with and without the grid:

A trio of external labels were added in the process too.

Now I need to make some progress getting the notes for all three of these typed-up and finalised so they can head-off to further swell Remy's queue of maps for the Atlas!

I'll post again when that's done.

Oh, and the critter in the Undercroft. It's a huge, serpent-bodied, 20-headed hydra!