Pro Fantasy Software

[Prometheus]

I have noticed that Pro Fantasy ( the makers of the Campaign Cartographer Software) Has come out with a Traveller friendly version program that can do ship floor plans, sector/subsector maps, planetary maps and various other applications. Has anyone used it? Any feedback?

spiff

 

[Falkayn]

I've used a few other products of theirs (CC2 Pro, Fractal Terrains, Town Designer) ... we had a discussion a week or so ago (or maybe more) about what software to do deckplans in.

The consensus seemed to be to use whatever you were most familiar with, but if you have no previous experience then the Pro Fantasy software will make it easy for you to turn out designs that look nice.

Personally I was already very familiar with Macromedia Fireworks and found that the easiest software to use.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

If time is a rare thing for You, CC2 + Cosmographer surely is a pretty good product, as it comes with a vast amount of symbols "ready for use", e.g. valves, hatches, complete cabins, powerplants & drives, control panels, sensors etc, as well as prepared templates for "interactive" multi-deck deckplans.
So even if you have to learn the usage, you might not have to waste time to draw all these components..

Well, learning the usage is an important factor, which is strongly related to personal taste, too. So it might be just worth a real try by getting a trial version

Anyway the CC2 community is quite stron and very helpful. You may take a look at the yahoo CC2 list.

Regards,

Mert

 

[Horatius]

CC2+ Cosmographer? Did Pro Fantasy put out a new software pack that I'm unaware of? I was just at their site and didn't see it.

CC2 is probably the easiest software out there to use. I have a little trouble exporting their fractal terrain maps into CC2, but thats just me.

If you've got no prior experience, sink the money into CC2. Save yourself the headaches.

 

[clementk]

Originally posted by Horatius:
CC2+ Cosmographer? Did Pro Fantasy put out a new software pack that I'm unaware of? I was just at their site and didn't see it.

It's recentish. http://www.profantasy.com/products/cos.asp

http://www.profantasy.com/products/ft.asp
Fractal Terrains (mentioned before in this thread) looks pretty cool for world detail. The demo was easy enough to use. No idea on how well it integrates with their other programs or NBOS' AstroSynthesis.

Casey

 

[aramis]

Sadly, their plans for a Mac version are, last I heard, canned. But CC2 is overall a good program, albeint CAD interface, rather than standard windows modes of doing things. Worht the effort, if you have a machine which will run it.

 

[savage]

sounds cool.

 

[aramis]

Oh, and Cosmographer is just additional symbol catalogs and map templates, plus allowing a different scale. It's clearly traveller-oriented. But it is just an add-on to CC2.

CC2 has a steep initial learning curve; it's worth the time, tho, to learn; the resultant maps are the gaming industry standard.

 

[MR TEK]

Maybe it is just all that thime with cad systems.

CC2 took me less time to learn than Macromedia. The tutorials sure help though.

When I got Cosmographer, I had a finished version od the standard scout inside a day, including customising the template and changing the standard scale.

(standard scale is yards, not meters, and thinks were just enough off kilter to offend the perfectionist in me.)

On the other hand, a full cad system, that can do things like calculate the area of arbitrary polygons, (odd shaped blocks, but you have to trace them.) is extreamly handy.

Yes cad systems tend to have a higher learning curve, but so do any top end graphics packages.

A simpler package has less of a learning curve, for the software, but learning to make something as formalized as deckplans is right at the limit of their capabilities, and you will waste a lot of time learning to get results that satisfy you, and you will NEVER be able to compleate a plan as quickly as you can with a more sophisticated system.

Anyway, my thoughts.

Mr Tek

 

[kaladorn]

My largest complaint is the difficulty of doing area flood fills in any CAD program. There are perfectly valid reasons for it in vector formatted drawings, but it is vexing. What ship deckplans etc. really seem to require is some sort of composite of raster and vector operations.