Always keep some spare oil handy. A simple animation produced from screen captures in CC3 by Joe Slayton who has been working on lighting effects and Fog Of War. Expect to see these lighting effects released in the Cartographer's Annual 2008 in the New Year, with examples and instructions and eventually in CC3.
( Animated gif behind the cut )
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Along side some excellent indie games and Qin (published by Pelgrane's French translator) Esoterrorists has been nominated for an Ennie award in the Best Rules category and got an honourable mention in Best Game. CC3 has two honourable mentions, but suffered I think because its category was abolished.
Voting will open here.
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A new version of CC3 is now available from our website. It fixes some Vista issues and adds new effects features including a global light direction which integrates with the filters.
Vista has caused us massive issues, because it is not properly backwards compatible. It's worse than XP and 2000 in that respect. Mark Fulford phoned up for XP tech support yesterday, only to be told that MS are not longer offering it. In contrast, ProFantasy is still offering tech support for the DOS version.
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 I'm pleased to say that Campaign Cartographer has been nominated for an Origins Award in the Game Accessory of the Year category. The original entries are submitted by the publishers, and then voted on by retailers. The final vote this year is made by attendees at Origins.
Before we knew it was retailers making the decision, we sent in Esoterrorists for inclusion, but the although Eso has done well through retailers, it was up against some hard hitters. I'm pleased to see that IPR publisher Luke Crane was nominated for Burning Empires.
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New versions of operating systems always cause development headaches, and Vista is no exception.
Microsoft changed a mouse hook in Vista, which means that the current version of CC3 has some problems under Vista. Also, Vista does not support the .hlp file format, and doesn't currently allow people the simple expedient of redistributing the tiny file which would allow .hlp to function. This means a decent amount of programming time spent adding hooks to dialog boxes so that it works with the updated help system.
We are also working on another problem. CC3 makes use of external artwork - pngs - which must be present on the computer in order for maps not to show missing link icons instead of symbols. This means if you don't have DD3, you can't view DD3 maps in CC3. We don't want the pngs redistributed, as this would violate our IP. To get round this problem, we've devised an encypted file format which CC3 can view, but locks the drawing to prevent saving.
As well as allowing CC3 users to view art from add-ons they don't own, it also means we can update the viewer, allowing us to include the artwork from any add-ons.
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Thousands of CC3 have been produced in the UK. Those destined for the US and Canada are currently at Stansted airport clearing customs and are due to be in States on Monday, but from past experience something will delay them for a couple of days. They will then ship out from Wisconsin. Those destined for the rest of the world will be posted out from the UK today, tomorrow and Monday. The CD includes the DD2/DD Pro compatibility upgrade for existing Dungeon Designer users, which is one of the reasons for the delay.
The quality of the DVD case, CDs and the booklet are better than I expected. The artwork on the CD in particular has come out well, with the silver of the CD showing through where white would be on the original artwork. Because we were producing a decent number, we were able to go for a full-color DVD booklet, which is printed on nice glossy paper. The only downside is that the text is printed CMY instead of black, hardly noticeable, but irritating as I set the PDF up using Distiller to make the text black, and spoke to the printer about it. It's hardly noticeable, though.
The artwork was created, like most of our design, by Peter Gifford of Universal Head, and can be seen here.
The other peculiar thing is that producing the software in the UK and shipping them was somehow cheaper than producing them in the US. I've also found it easier to work with UK companies. Despite their tendency to screw things up more often that US companies (or perhaps because of it), they appear to be more flexible, and willing to fix errors that they have caused than most of the US printers we've used. This is probably a horrible generalisation, and I stand awaiting correction. Our previous UK printer was very cheap, regularly screwed things up but would always reprint if things were wrong. Unsurprisingly, they've gone bust.
I have a feeling we printed too few, though, and stock may run out in four months rather than a year. How different to the printing issues with roleplaying games!
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At least the cleric is prepared...
( Maps behind the cut )
A small sample from DD Pro.
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