Star Fleet 2010

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• Clunky backwards out of date User Interface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

I’m happy to say that at times people will be able to watch me working from now on.. I won’t promise to always have the livestream going but I do hope to at least be broadcasting from time to time, letting people see me work on art as I’m actually doing it rather then just the end product.

If you don’t know what Livestream is, it is literally a live stream of my desktop + any other video i wish to share, in most cases when it comes to my computer the live stream would be of my graphics tablet.

I doubt that there isn’t any one really around who hasn’t heard of Andy, of course any one who has seen lord of the rings knows him as Gollum, Or maybe you know him as King Kong…. or if your only just getting into movies.. Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the apes.. Are you starting to see the way this is going.. Andy is the man behind the biggest CGI characters in many movies for the past 10 years.

I really wonder if we would even have things like Camerons Avatar if it was not for Andy? I mean his performance as Gollum opened up the world of CGI being played not by the Animators.. who while skilled are not trained actors, but by actors.. I dare any one to look at the movies this man has been the soul behind the CGI and not say that the Computer Generated character can move your heart.

And yet, so little is heard of him at times.. I wonder really if history will record that Serkis gave birth to modern CGI acting?

Alright my ‘goal’ for the next few months is to post somethign at least twice a week up here.. and start this working as it’s meant to be a page for my musings and the like..

saddly a lot of the work i’m doing at the moment still won’t be up here, can’t help it.. NDA’s do that, once I get approval to show what i’ve been working on I will.

You know it actually gets me reading the news of late, all you see if the US issue and of cours ethe US issue is dragging the rest of the world down with it.

What issue is that? Oh just their Debt problem, and the AAA being reduced to AA+. Now i’m not exactly an Accountent nor am I an American so maybe that gives me the whole thing of being able to look at the issue with out getting my back up, but the problem seems obvious, the United States is spending more money then it’s taking in in tax.

So how does one fix this? Well if you look at the damned spending list there is a few biggens but over all this is my view..

First off you Cut some of that Defense budget, hell the US is the meter stick these days for the rest of the world, it’s like britan pre 1939… which may given the way it’s going be a really great analogy, but anyway.. cut the defence budget back some, if this means heaven forbid that the United states has to tell the rest of the world to do it’s own policing for a time and actually keep it’s nose out of other peoples business.. so be it, it’d be nice to see the UN have to work out how to enforce it’s procedures if the US told it ‘only if you pay for the troops boys’. And if it means ending a war that not even the Russians managed to win so be it too.

Second, Start measures to create jobs within the United States, if this means screwing up the free trade agreement then go for it, the United States already ignores most of it’s ‘agreements’ when it’s in its best intrests to anyway.. So start laying tarriffs on all those goods which COULD be produced in the United States and on the services that COULD be offered by people in the states rather then… say india, make it so that the cheap ass goods flowing in from China and India and the like actually COST as much to buy as the stuff made locally.. give the locals a chance.

Third, Those fat cat CEO’s who made so much of this mess and still take home Million Dollar pay checks… Limit them, and then TAX THEM. Look you can’t tax the poor they can’t give you any more money then you are already getting, the Middle Class are on the Verge of becoming Poor which leaves the Rich and saddly powerful.. if they want that power.. they should have to PAY for it, they have money tax it, after all they get that money from the people who work for them and the oppurtinities offered by the laws of the country they work in.

Number four.. As you start to actually get jobs going, which means tax revenue increases by the way.. and you get some of those multi-billion dollar CEO’s money.. and have reduced a bunch of spending on defense and maybe a few other stuipid things, actually look at increasing the STANDARD OF LIVING for the Lower Class… this means improving wealthfare and health so that these people actually have a chance to be healthy and able to get a job.

Number Five.. EDUCATION, that’s right revamp the damned education system, give people the chance to learn the skills that they need to be able to earn a pay check and pay the goverment… taxes, while your at it.. pay the teachers what they are worth, and make a national fucking standard for what Secondary / high school’s actually have to have on their ciriculiums..

And failing to do all that, start another Cold war, china sounds good for you.. after all the 60′s where a great economical time for you.. and why? the height of the last cold war.. before that was World War 2.. but some how I don’t think we need World War Three.

of course I expect to be abused and yelled at for even thinking of telling the US goverment how to do things, But I”m tired of seeing the US debt dragging every one down.. and the US claims to be the home of Free Speach.. so here’s my two cents on it.

Flame away.