CC3 Feature Suggestions

[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.

[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.

[ProFantasy]

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.

Grouping forest is not something we'd want to add by default, if only because it would make such forests different to ones created with symbols. However, if you want grouped forests you can edit the forest drawing tools.

1. Click the CC3 icon, right click drawing tools, then pull down the list of styles to select Overland CC3 (you can repeat this on any other styles)

2. Select the first Terrain Default, Forest (let's take Forest, Mixed as an example)

3. Click the "Command to Execute" button
SELSAVE
SELBYP
FORESTLOAD #system\fillers\mixed.fil
FOREST
CHANGEL VEGETATION
SELREST

4. Add GROUP before SELREST - eg:

SELSAVE
SELBYP
FORESTLOAD #system\fillers\mixed.fil
FOREST
CHANGEL VEGETATION
GROUP
SELREST

5. Repeat this with each style.

[Valarian]

4. Add GROUP before SELREST - eg:

It's that simple a change to the macro? Doh!
Thanks

[ProFantasy]

Ooo, and use the Centre Mouse to zoom in an out! That would be soooooooooo useful!

Dynamic Pan is an option - whatever you do don't do it with Effects on or on a large map. It comes with the CAD engine, but we've disabled it by default.

Select Tools >> Options.
Select Use Middle Mouse Button for Zooming.
Click the middle mouse button - now you can pan.
Hold the left button down and move up and down to zoom in and out.
Right click for options or to cancel.

Caching a render of the map for panning would be very memory intensive - it could be an option and happen in the background, I supposed. Usually people zoom extents then window to get where they want to go.

[Robbie]

How about a navigator window similar to photoshops? Basically it has a thumbnail of the map, with a red box showing the currently zoomed viewable area, you can drag that red box around to view a different area of the map.

[deltadave]

Would be nice to be able to export to editable vector files. CC2/CC3 are great tools, but not very good for painterly effects. Would be nice if I could grab vector file(s) (EPS, PDF, SVG, etc) and bring them into Xara for some paint love and get access to the CC sheets and layers.

[Ascension]

Along this line of exporting things...the ability to export as a Photoshop psd file with all the layers (or sheets or whatever) so that I can manually tweak things and paint effects and textures on. Just an idea, don't know if it already does this or not since I don't own it but if it did export as psd then I would most certainly buy it.