Campaign Cartographer - Another Sortie (And Some Facts About Hexagons)

It had been almost a year since I treated myself to the CC3+ bundle, and wrote my initial impressions post.  Since then, with one thing and another making demands on my time I just didn't get around to doing much with it, mainly due to the investment of time in learning how to use it that it was clearly going to require.

Recently, I did manage to find a weekend to play around with it again.  I wanted to produce a digital version of some crude hand-drawn maps of a region of my setting in which a sub-campaign has arisen.  This is a heavily wooded area (it's in the Dreadwood, for the benefit of those familiar with the Greyhawk setting), so there were really going to be rather a lot of trees.

CC3 is like a CAD package rather than photo-editing and I have never gotten on with CAD software, and CC3 is no exception. If I can slog up the learning curve the advantages should in theory outweigh the disads.

My starting point was a rather dull but essential ~15 part YouTube tutorial. Then to crack on with my own map.

Some things about CC3 are a giant arse-ache. The most difficult part, is when you have to change something after you've placed it. Selecting and transforming objects is really hard work compared with a photoediting package. Since my old PC was retired along with Corel Photopaint I've had to grapple with learning how to do stuff in GIMP. After a laborious weekend with CC3, I'll never complain about the non-usability of GIMP again!

Often, the only way to select an object that's been placed in an area dense with other stuff is to isolate the layer it's on, hide all the other layers, and then select it. This is made much harder by the fact that there seems to be no simple way to, say, right-click an object and have a dialog box pop up with an option to list the layers and sheets it is on, and there is a lot of trial and error involved.

If you don't get an object right first time it's often less work to Ctrl-Z and just do the damn thing all over again than it is to change it.  I think I am gradually getting to grips with its idiosyncrasies. There are probably ways to make life easier working with it that I haven't found out yet.  Not one for "map-making in a hurry" though.

I think the results weren't too disappointing given that it's my first real mapping project in CC3+.  This is a low-res version of the region I've completed so far.  The whole Dreadwood is much larger but other bits of the overall map are still a work in progress.

This map is for the benefit of the players, so there's plenty of hidden features of the area not shown on this one.

The scale bar, I just couldn't get to work properly and should be disregarded.  Hexes are 7.5 miles.

Dreadwood - Camp Ragfried Environs Map, with 7.5 mile hexes

So, that was that.

                                                                                                                                     

Some Facts About Hexagons

Today, I returned to my mapping efforts with Campaign Cartographer, and I was immediately reminded of how non-intuitive the program feels to someone who usually works with raster graphics.  Despite having spent a whole weekend on it quite recently, on firing it up again I struggled to accomplish anything and was spitting in frustration.  "How are you supposed to select anything?"  In pretty much every graphics package I've used before there is a Select tool.  It took me a little while to recall that in CC3+, you decide what you want to do first and pick the tool for the operation; then it prompts you to select something.  Anyway, hopefully with regular visits to CC3+ the old dog will eventually learn these new tricks.

The order of the day this time was to explore how to expand maps once they've initially been created, to add new territory.  I also wanted to tinker around with hex grids and implement a scalable, layered hex scheme in which each hex can be broken down into a pattern of smaller hexes.

Campaign Cartographer - Initial Impressions

Yet more mapping tools.  It came to my attention that Campaign Cartographer (CC) was on time-limited offer together with its adds-on City Cartographer, Dungeon Cartographer and a host of other extras for £22.83 from Humble Bundle.  This seemed too good an opportunity to pass on despite only just recently having purchased Dungeon Painter Studio, so I took the plunge and acquired this suite.

So here are some immediate first impressions of CC.  As with DPS, definitely not a review.

First of all, the UI of CC is much less intuitive than DPS offering if what you want is a quick dungeon layout or building interior.  This was my comparative test.  DPS I was able to immediately get to work with on a small project to create a building floorplan.  When I tried to do the same with CC I was flailing around getting nowhere; all the "obvious" elements I expected to be presented in the UI just weren't there.  I should emphasise that with both products I was trying to see what I could accomplish with minimal reference to any help instructions or googling "how to".

I did find it much easier however to start making a geographic map in CC, though still quite tricky.

I started working through CC's Quick Start guide, and things began to make more sense.

The CC bundle is about twice the price of DPS, but comes packed with a lot more features and assets than DPS.  I can see that CC is a more powerful and mature product but is built around a different design paradigm.  DPS is more like a raster graphics program like Photoshop or Corel Photopaint, or GIMP.  CC is more like a vector-graphics, CAD program.  I have more experience with the raster graphics paradigm than vector graphics which is probably why I found DPS so much easier to get started with.  I will persevere with CC and work through its tutorials.  I can see that these two different tools will have differing strengths and applications.

Dungeon Painter Studio - My Experience With Using This

OK, so I decided to make the modest investment of about £11 to purchased a copy of Dungeon Painter Studio, by Pyromancers.  It utilises the Steam platform.  This meant making a Steam account for the first time.

After trying out various demos and watching youtube reviews I chose this over other available tools because it is cheap and has a fairly intuitive UI and uses layers and lets you change what you've already "painted" quite easily after the event rather than making you paint over your mistakes.  I was tempted by the pricier Campaign Cartographer bundle at £42 but decided to see how I got on with a more economical offering to begin with.

I actually hate having to invest time in discovering "quirks" of user interfaces (read poor design) of drawing packages.  Some people enjoy the pleasure of tinkering with tools as a pursuit in itself; I am not one of those people, I am more of a "get the damn job done" kind of person.  I am still smarting over having to get to grips with the annoyances of GIMP after my ancient version of Corelsuite, which I was very proficient in, refused to run on Windows 10 and the newest version was at a price point clearly aimed at art & graphic design professionals on a corporate budget (which I am not).

I've really only just started playing with this, so this is not a full review.  I will post follow ups on this on later occasions.

Initial impressions: I get on OK with the UI, it is as intuitive as I'd like it to be but it has a few minor design quirks that need smoothing out.  Like for example: you need to be in Select mode to select things; so, suppose you want to edit a set of items in succession, you click to edit an item and then it drops out of "Select" mode while editing but doesn't return into Select mode when you've finished.  You then have to click the Select mode icon again before you select something else to edit.  It's only one more click but it's an annoyance especially if the items you are editing are all on the opposite side of the screen to the Select mode button.

There are major gaps in the catalogue of assets that come pre-loaded, so pretty soon you'll be wanting to import your own .png files.  This brings me to my second gripe - it will only let you import your assets one at a time.

I trawled t'interwebs for a workaround.  Someone has written extensive instructions on how to import multiple assets into DPS, but it's basically a coding exercise which is way more complexity than I'm looking for.  I might have a go at implementing it sometime but for now it's no bulk upload.

Overall first impression: the design paradigm is good and "painting" maps is reasonably intuitive, but some rough edges and missing functionality that give the impression this is not a mature product.  I expect it to improve with time.  For now, it's adequate and worth the price tag.