November 2017 Mapping Challenge: VeterHaven Fortress

[Mark Oliva]

I wanted to get back to you earlier, but the guild was off the air for a while.

I was thinking that I have no idea what a weaver's shop would look like, but if I had something that would pass for a weavers loom, I could put it on a sign. That's what I was thinking of doing to all of my shops, instead of the typical map key. Putting up signs to show what they are. After all, during the Dark Ages, most people were illiterate. So most shopkeeps used symbols on their signs that were easily recognized.

weaver.png

weaver.jpg

There were some mechanical looms in larger weaving houses in cities, but your village is too small for one. Most smaller weaving operations worked with hand looms. That's the reason that German weavers guilds used the symbol above. The not particularly good photo shows you a woman using a Middle Ages hand loom, just to give you an idea how this looks.

You don't need a special symbol for a weaving mill. With topdown symbols, you need special symbols only if the building needs something special for its symbol, such as a waterwheel, a windmill, vents for a brewery, outdoor loading ramps, etc. A weaving mill needs none of these, so a generic rooftop symbol will do just fine.

Other than that, the latest update looks good. (But I still think you should have loads of zombies besieging the place!)

[Mark Oliva]

Just a curious question:

What's this?

whatsit.jpg

Servus!

[ladiestorm]

You caught that did you? Nothing gets past you!!! It goes with the one at the Garrison. It's called an escape tunnel If something happened, and the enemy (what ever it is) did manage to break through the defenses... there is an escape to hopeful safety! No fortress should be without it!

[Mark Oliva]

You caught that did you? Nothing gets past you!!! It goes with the one at the Garrison. It's called an escape tunnel If something happened, and the enemy (what ever it is) did manage to break through the defenses... there is an escape to hopeful safety! No fortress should be without it!

Sounds like a good idea.

With this next one it's just about like picking a nit. But it does have me puzzled.

For some time, I've been looking at this map and thinking I'm getting something of an optical illusion, but I hadn't been able to put my finger on what it was. It just seemed like some of the buildings looked more like roofs flat upon the ground. I finally figured it out:

shadows.jpg

The buildings in white have excellent shadowing ... just right. That's unusual for CC3+ maps. Many of them have shadows of sunset length with high noon lighting. However, the buildings in yellow here have either no shadows at all or shadows so short that they're almost invisible, which gives the flat-roof-on-the-ground look to them, when standing next to the well-shadowed roofs.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the shadows thrown onto the ground by the building, not the internal roof shadowing. This occurs with buildings in some other parts of the map too.

Seeing that this is a CC3+ map, I can come up with only one possible cause (although there certainly may be others). That would be that the buildings are on more than one sheet, and one/some sheet(s) has/have too tight a shadow dimensioning.

Nix für Ungut!

Servus!

[ladiestorm]

Well, they SHOULD be on my structures sheet, but you know how cc3+ LOVES to put symbols on their own sheets! They are probably on the symbols sheet, because I will admit, I don't always remember to un check the option of auto placing symbols. But that's an easy enough fix, thanks for catching it.

[Mouse]

If a symbol is predestined to be placed on a sheet called SYMBOLS by default, and you don't already have a sheet called "SYMBOLS" in your file, CC3 will create one and place that predestined symbol on the new sheet.

The way to stop that from happening is to rename your STRUCTURES sheet to SYMBOLS STRUCTURES, and make absolutely sure that you have that particular sheet selected before you fetch the building you want to paste.

If you have a SYMBOLS STRUCTURES sheet, but it isn't selected when you fetch the building to be pasted, a new SYMBOLS sheet will still be created, and the building pasted onto it. I have no idea why this is so, but I suspect it may be to maintain some semblance of order where things might otherwise become extremely muddled up. It helped a lot when I was working with a file with over 100 sheets

[ladiestorm]

I usually put symbols, structures or symbol trees, for each symbol that I have a lot of. I think I forgot to put the symbol in front of the structures this time in my sheets. But I always click on the sheet I want before I start placing. And I usually keep the symbols sheet, for those few symbols that don't belong to any other group.

But in this case, I think this was happening, because they were all on different layers. I forgot to make a layer for my structures. Hopefully, I have it fixed now.

[ladiestorm]

Well, as of this moment, my map is finished. I may still tinker on it for the next two days, to fix any issues, but as far as the map is concerned... for good, or for ill, I'm done.

### Latest WIP ###
Fort Veterhaven.09LRG.JPG

[Mouse]

Oh I like the fires!

Very dramatic!

Ummm... would now be a good time to ask why you have so much extra paper top and bottom?

[rdanhenry]

Nice zombie threat. The fire looks surprising good. Unfortunately, while the pictorial elements are looking sweet, I am not finding those labels to be very readable. Maybe a bit of glow would fix it? It might need a plainer font. I don't know. I'm not a labeling guru, I just know it is hard for me to read it.