An example from one of our beta testers (Robert J Defendi) of a quick City Designer 3 map using Sean Thomas's style. The shadows on the ground don't currently match the roof, but that'll be fixed shortly.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
The latest feature in City Designer 3. You select one (or more) buildings, a number of floors, and it creates floorplans with outlines and floors, all neatly linked back to the main map and to each other.
9 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
ProFantasy is having a pre-Christmas development frenzy. Peter Olsson is with me from Sweden working hard on the updated House Settings dialog for City Designer 3. To match the new raster art, he's add the option to add symbols to roofs in house settings. Pictures tomorrow. We'll get a couple of other neat features added to CD3 before release, too.
Joe Slayton has been working on light filters for CC3. We are hoping to get fog of war working, although I can't guarantee it. The difficulty is to do this efficiently without introducing 3D. We want shadows to be able to be infinite, or have a fixed length, without having to worry about the height of entities.
Mike Riddle has made some nice additions to CC3, adding an Apply button to the print dialog, and changing the status indicator colours to a clickable colour. He's also fixed the bug where png symbols shifted slightly add cardinal angles, and a nasty group-related bug.
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
We are finishing up the programming for City Designer 3 in December. We may have room to squeeze in some new features. If you've got any suggestions, post them here.
6 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
City Designer 3 supports shaded roofs - see this previous post. We just specify an angle and pitch for each surface. We can do this for vectors using a special shading entity, and for external PNG artwork, we use a PNG map, where we use the RGB values to specify angle and pitch. Change the global sun direction, and the shadows change, and different height buildings can be sorted onto different sheets to give differing shadow lengths. The difficulty comes with domes and cones, which require a much more tricky PNG map. Here they are, courtesy of Peter Olsson:
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
This image is composed of one house drawn for us by Ed Bourelle, the other buildings are produced using the updated House utility in the City Designer 3 add-on. They are pretty hard to distinguish, and that's the idea.
- The roofs vary in steepness - and different steepness gives different shading.
- You can change the angle and inclination of the sun, and this can (optionally) affect any shadow filter.
- If you were to rotate any building, the shading would change to be correct.
- The roofs have angled png fill styles.
- You can turn the shadows, roof shading and angled fill styles off to increase redraw speed.
10 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
A few minutes' break from DD3.
Joe Slayton has written a directional shadow filter for use with City Designer 3. Combined with the roof shadow, it gives a good directional light effect.
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
We've been working on ways to support roof shading in City Designer 3. In CD Pro, if you place a building, you can control which roof sections appears dark and light, but this doesn't change if you rotate the building, and it doesn't work with house symbols.
For the new version, we want a method which allows us to rotate buildings and still retain the shading with no extra work for the user. It has to work with png and with vector symbols. Here is an early sample. It's the same building in png format, displaying roof shading. I've also added a shadow effect on the buildings for emphasis.
The big problem is doing more complex shapes. This may require a complete rewrite, as there is no way of shading domes at the moment. Other issues: the wall shadow filter (the one the building casts) is a fixed direction, whereas the roof shadow direction is easily adjustable. It would be good if we could do an omnidirectional wall shadow.
5 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
We've employed two new artists for City Designer 3, Ed Bourelle of Skeleton Key Games and Sean MacDonald.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
|
Oh, well.
I should listen to my own advice, and the advice that every publisher gives newbies when they ask about what is important when working with freelancers. That is, get a firm quote, and get the terms written down early on.
Due to a misunderstanding in email exchanges, both I and the excellent artist Robert Lazzaretti wasted a lot of each other's time. Rob was going to be doing symbols for the forthcoming City Designer 3. Unbeknownst to either of us, we were at completely different ends of the price spectrum. It turned out that he was expecting about as much as we are likely to make on CD3 in a year; and we were expecting him to work for one third of the rate he was expecting.
Robert did a lot of prep work and great art samples, and I was planning on getting the work underway this week.
This happened entirely because we didn't get down to the nitty-gritty early on. I assumed what I thought was his current rate from his second email, and he guessed that because we were a software company and wanted to allow our users to use his symbols as they liked, we would be willing and able to spend more money.
At least, I've learnt something, and I know Rob has. Contracts don't have to be complex and they can even be emailed, but it's best to get them out of the way early on.
We've put the call out for new artists, and I hope to be able to announce something soon.
7 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Here is a small section of a map which combines simple vector buildings and other symbols with bitmap fill styles and effects. It's based on Waterdeep from the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas, and the original map is copyright Hasbro. It's by no means finished.
I used the following effects:
- Blur on the water
- Drop shadow and glow on the text
- Bevel on the woods
- Wall shadow on the buildings
- Transparency on the building outlines
- Texturize on the roads
A more detailed section:  The whole map includes over 100,000 entities and takes about 8 seconds to redraw with effects on. We'd love to do a new Forgotten Realms Atlas, given the chance, using the new features in CC3, and employing the best cartographers to create a new style. If you'd like to see this too, sign our online petition.
11 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
I've found an artist for City Designer 3. He is Robert Lazzaretti, former WotC cartographer. Ralf Schemmann, a frequent ProFantasy freelancer was putting together a proposal for a new product which included a reference to Rob's art. This reminded me of his existence and pointed me at his gallery over at the very useful Pen and Paper database of roleplaying game contributors. I worked with him when we were doing the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas - he created the symbol set.
His art style is very different to Dave Allsop's, who has done our overland and Dungeon Designer 3 art. Dave's gives the impression of an oil painting; Rob's is more of a water colour or acrylic. However, we need to use the right style for the job. Rob's clean style will work well with large cities, and the individual buildings then linked to floorplans and dungeons created with Dave's DD3 artwork.
Here is the first proof of concept drawing created with CD3 plus Rob's artwork. Note the wall shadow effect.
14 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
|
|
|
