Star Fleet 2010

as the title states I’ve not been updating here as much as I should.. you can find a load of new art up at my deviant art account starfleet.deviantart.com

I hope to start posting some in depth info on the universe i’ve been doing the art for in here soon ™

-Rob

For those who know me I’ve been playing Eve for a LONG time, I go away at times.. and come back.. why because it’s the only game like it out there.. and yet CCP can’t seem to get anything right of late.

Incarna was the promised Ambulation, walking in station.. having a human body at last.. something promised since 2006ish.. and it comes out half finished and people scream.. and now guess what? that’s right.. incarna’s been axed.. goodbye.

This SUCKS. -3 subs to CCP.

Warning the following is not all roses and it is the authors personal view if you have a problem with it tough luck by being at this site you agree to the legal conditions over to the side.

As some may know I use Profantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 3 a fair bit and I must say that over all it’s a generally great program, CC3 as we call it has seen a wealth of new features added that make it amazingly better then it’s last major 2.x version, the bitmap graphics abilities for one, the addition of lovely styles for another over all it’s a good program however judging by my title and how i generally post yeah you are right I have a ‘beef’ with the program.

First off Lets just List out those Good points in Dot Format.

• Amazing Bitmap Tile Library
• Great Tools
• Amazing Add Ons
• Powerful for making both bitmap and vector based maps of any format.
• Ahead of the competition in most respects

Ok got that, now some of the bad

• Clunky backwards out of date User Interface
• User Interface that Ignores the ‘standards’ of every other drawing application and even most modern cad programs
• Built on the backbone of a FastCad version that is no longer supported.
• Regularly has little issues that profantasy promise to fix that then take forever to get fixed (see the ugly section that is coming up).

Now don’t get me wrong again here I’m willing to ignore 99% of that ‘bad’ list, I love Campaign Cartographer it lets me make great maps.. or well did does most of hte time.. you see that is where we hit the ‘ugly’ section here, and Campaign Cartographer has a few ‘Uglies’ that really stand out to you if you’ve been using the program for a while and you know the worst part, Profantasy knows about them and yet hasn’t really done anything about them except say that they are ‘limited’ in what they can do due to ‘the underlying cad engine’..

So what are those uglys?

Well for a start CC3 is based on Fastcad32 that’s right the 32 Version of fastcad, what’s wrong with that? well it’s actually based on 6.2 of Fastcad which you can’t ‘even upgrade yourself to fix the problems found.. Add to that the fact that it tends to not like windows updates (though profantasy has gone a long way to redressing this) and it starts to get even more fun.. Then there is the fact that it’s a 32 Bit program in a 64 bit world.. and we see no rush to update it to allow it to use that extra memory… and to add to those problems.. Whow to ye if you should attempt to export a Graphically ‘intense’ image that is over 7000x7000pixels in size. At this point you may or may NOT end up with that lovely windows 7 window popping up telling you that FCW32.exe has stopped responding… and it’s not just exporting that this can happen on, but printing and anything else that requires the vaulted Fastcad engine to ‘render’ the entire image you have been workign on.

But this is not the worst of it,  no should you manage to get this lovely image to actually render your likely to have to spend the next hour fixing it in a 3rd party program! And this is the one that really irks me off the most, you see Campaign Cartographer 3 renders out with what those in the industry would call ‘graphical artifacts’ and no these are not the same as holy relics .. they are to put it bluntly graphical data that should not be there in any shape or form.. how does CC3 do it? Well it tends to add extra ‘lines’ into your image at approxamently every 400 pixels on the Y axis of your image.. (the Heigh Axis’s for those of you who need it explained).. so you end up with things like this

See all those ugly little jagged changes in the lines.. horrible right? And yeah extra data that shouldn’t be there..

That’s fine you might say let profantasy know they’ll fix it after all Campaign Cartographer is ‘professional’ software, costing 45 pounds for the base program then 40 pounds for every expansion/add-on (And that’s cheaper then it was when I brought it) not to mention the yearly annual subscriptions right?

Wrong.

Profantasy has known about this ‘bug’ for over a year, actually it’s pushing 2 years for this bug and we where told it would be fixed however it has not been, instead now we get ‘work arounds’ which include using a 3rd party program and ‘moving’ the image to fix it pixel by pixel.. and the excuse given for why the bug hasn’t been fixed and i will quote the actual email that i recieved.

Believe me, we would like to fix this bug as much as you.
I’m doing maps professionally too after all. But owing to the nature of CC3
with its underlying CAD engine and many externally programmed parts, there are
certain limitations on what we CAN do to fix things like that. Something being
high on our priority list unfortunately doesn’t mean that we can fix it when we
want to.

I can only say that we’ll continue to look for a solution
for this export problem. I’ll let you know specifically, when we find a way
around it in CC3 itself.

This is all well and good but if they can’t do anything about it then how did they write in their brand new ‘anti-aliasing’ addon.. oh that’s right they just really double the image then process it outside of CC3 down by 1/2 causing more crashes.

For professional level software the above artifacts and the above reasoning is a joke. You have to remember Profantasy plugs their software at every major gaming convention, I wonder are they showing the fact that this bug exists 2 years in?

And Now i know I’m not going to be making friends with Ralf or Simon over at Profantasy by posting this but 2 years of ‘waiting’ for a primary bug to be fixed is a joke and makes one really consider going to use Nbos’s slightly less robust but at least readily patched and updated.. FM software, especailly given that Ed the developer over there is ready to listen to his users and do his best to update his own program coded from scratch to do what they require it to do.

-Rob

Just a heads up if you use EXRTrader which is a plugin by DB&W for exporting EXR files was updated!

EXRTRADER 1.5 is now avalible for those who use it, Quoted is their release info remember you can get to their site at http://www.db-w.com/

This release features a number of feature requests from our user as well as a tweaks to the user interface, the presets system and an expanded user manual.

Changes since V1.5

Added support for writing OpenEXR data windows depending on the content of the buffers. This descreases the size of image files and speeds up loading and compositing in applications that support the OpenEXR data window (such as Fusion 6, Nuke or Shake) Updated the presets to allow for user defined directories.

Added the Pixel Inspector to the VIPER preview Various minor tweaks, such as adding a dedicated VIPER button the main user interface to toggle VIPER.

Minor bugfixes, mainly to the presets system

The free update is available in our downloads section.

Best Regards,

Dagmar and Mike.

To unsubscribe from these announcements, login to the forum and uncheck “Receive forum announcements and important notifications by email.” in your profile.

You can view the full announcement by following this link:

http://forums.db-w.com/index.php?topic=484.0

Regards,

The db&w Support Forum Team.

Knowing as I do how well the db&w team’s gear works.. this is great news.. EXRTrader is a great plugin for LW.

Nothing definant yet but I might end up teaching some basic 3D modelling and animation stuff, If I do I may look at adding the material from it up in the tutorials section or at least parts.

This won’t be full video tutorials more likely just the notes etc.