I've more or less finished my first map with Campaign Cartographer, and so feel qualified to comment on it now. So I'll just be doing that for a time. I realize I'm probably the only one who cares, but for the rest of you, here's a nice map to look at.
1. Bitmap symbols and fill styles are, for the most part, a huge plus. They look stunning, are easy enough to use, and generally have good-looking varicolor fills and so give you a wide variety of looks possible. Randomized symbols within a category is also highly useful, though there seems to a bug where it sticks on one symbol a lot.
On the other hand, load and redraw times are noticably higher. The new swamp symbol looks awful, and unlike in CC2, I can't easily correct that. In fact, they made really zero provision for people wanting swamps or moors or things, which seems utterly bizzare to me given the FR Atlas. Too, while there are forest bitmap fills, which should reduce the amount of time I spend doing forests, they work badly and so do not. Oh well.
2. Dynamic templates were a really good idea. On the other hand, unless I go to the trouble of creating a new map style, which I don't know how to do yet, I've still got some hand editing to do to make myself happy with things like map borders.
3. The way the new drawing tools work (default coast, sea, etc) are mostly good, but are ultimately problematic because I end up using a lot of multipolies for continents and things, which by the very nature of multipolies defeats this setup. I can work around that though. Cost of doing business.
4. On the other hand, sheets are mostly a disaster. They don't automatically switch between each other very well, which is a pain, and can actively screw up your entire map in a way layers do not if you accidentally draw a bunch of stuff on the wrong sheet. I've spent more time thus far fighting sheets so far than actually getting use out of them, which is bad.
5. We're still lacking good 2d town/city markers ala FRIA, but I expected that, and I'm capable of recreating those symbols, so no big deal.
6. I really wish there was a built-in way to do FRIA-style text, but I didn't expect it to happen, so I'm not too disappointed. However, doing an entire map full of FR-style outlined text is a real pain in the ass.
7. There are a few other quirks, like grid snapping and the default non-visual move that annoy me. I can pretty much deal, though.
8. Providing support for old CC2 add-ons was a nice touch, and appreciated, since I have somewhere over $100 in said add-ons.
Overall, I'm pretty happy. I've been a happy CC2 user for about 10 years now, and was always happy with the high-quality maps that, if they weren't quite poster-quality, were good enough for government work. CC3 took that and made it better. Almost as usable (though I say that as somebody who knows the program), and maps that ARE poster-quality. I like it, I do.
Posted by Dwip at January 28, 2007 12:59 AM