CC3 Feature Suggestions

[ProFantasy]

I think overall unifying the drawing conventions added by CD3 and DD3, etc, would be a good idea overall.

Can you enlarge on this please? I don't really understand.

[Robbie]

Can you enlarge on this please? I don't really understand.

Well, I was referring to the rotation of boxes like the rotation and scaling of houses in CD3...things like that need to be unified I think so that all shapes and symbols have similar functionality. I can't remember which is which, but I know you can hold down shift or ctrl while drawing to rotate and/or scale some things in CD, but you can't in regular CC...I think some things you can and some things you can't.

[Davros01]

Photo Realistic - I would like to see the FT Pro merged into CC3 so that its easy to make photo realistic maps in CC3. Thats the one thing that photoshop seems to have over CC3 to me. Otherwise, I am a devout CC3 user.

Marc

[MadCartographer]

I have a suggestion. Text along a curve. This needs better handeling. Give the users options on the direction of the text. It only goes 1 way. I recently needed it to go the other way. I had to do it manually, 1 letter at a time to get it the direction I needed.

CC3 is a great product, I'd never use another product.
Thanks ProFantasy!

[Felonius]

The A#1 Feature CC3 needs:

Previewing of fill textures when adjusting object properties.

[Patrakis]

Handles ... I'd like to see handles in CC3. I always thought the the way Illustrator lets you play with polygons and paths with the ancor points is a real plus. Really intuative interface.

I'd also like the implementation of gradients in CC3, if that was possible. With those, i don't think i'd go back to illustrator anytime soon

Pat

[mogul76]

I agree with Patrakis and was about to post it myself: I think that gradients are an important feature / sheet effect which is missing.

Furthermore, as I mentioned on the Profantasy Community Forum, I'd like to see the new light entities and sheet effects introduced in the July issue of the Cartographer's Annual 2008 fixed. When exporting a map at a high resolution and rendering the areas in which the light entities have not directly been placed, CC3/DD3 "forgets" the light beams coming from other parts of the map and, hence, doesn't apply the effects.

Also, instead of areas that are not lit automatically becoming completely black, it would be nice to be able to add a transparency to that black layer. In that manner, cartographers could easily create night versions of their battle maps.

[RPMiller]

Hm... I noticed that ProFantasy has 0 Rep. We can't allow that. I've begun the beatings.

As for the question, honestly, I have a really hard time trying to come up with new features as I've used it for so long and having been a draftsman everything seems "right" to me already. I think the thing I struggle with the most though are symbol sets. I don't know what it is, but I always feel lost when I'm going in to choose symbols and/or find what I need. I'm not sure if it is the folder structure, naming, or something else entirely.

[waldronate]

I'd like to see:

* Faster redraws (ok, that's probably not within scope of the request, but that and the funky leftover bits from deletes are high on my list of annoyances).

* Symbol Fills based on regular symbols (including PNG symbols).

* Dynamic symbol fills (symbols stay the same size as you zoom in and out). It would be nice if they responded ot entities on highers sheets/layers as well. For example, if I draw a river across a forest I'd like have the ability to tell the forest symbols to move out of the way of the river. It's a non-trivial routing problem, to be sure.

* Dynamic Fractalization (coastline detail changes as you go in and out).

* Antialiased lines onscreen during drawing.

* A plain gripe: the default landmass tool as listed in the tutorial doesn't show what the final fractal connection will look like. I realize it's a minor gripe and probably not what you're asking for but it's annoying to draw a good shape only to have that last line go all wonky on me. Also, I can't seem to find a way to reshape a fractal coastline without redoing it (the original points I entered seem to be gone with just the fractal bits left - if I try to EDIT or DYNEDIT I can get the fill or outline but not both). Sure, I can do all of this manually but it kinda defeats the purpose of having a tool labeled "landmass".

* Artistic line styles. I'd like to see something other than basic CG lines. Sketchy lines and the like.

* Atlas tools. User can draw an overview map and then select an area to have CC3 pull out the marked area to a new map. The original map would be saved but keep a hotlink to the new map. From that I'd like to be able to say "generate HTML" to have all of that work saved to JPG/PNG files and HTML with links (SVG would be a nice option for saving the files). I'm lazy and hate doing this sort of thing by hand.

That's probably enough for now.

[Valarian]

I'd like to see the symbols that make up the drawing tools for forests in the CC3 overland grouped so that I could select the entire forest as a single entity. It'd be good to speed up the refresh on these as well. It seems that a few overland forests really slows the refresh rate down.