Icons & Commands

(in order as they appear in the text)

In Part I, we had begun drawing a symbol for a summoning circle. Your CC2 would have looked something like this. If you have not already done so, please open the file Wizards Lab.fsc in your CC2.

     Ok, it seems to me that the circle would not be drawn in two thin lines on the floor. In fact, it probably was inlaid with something arcane and valuable. Let's say it was inlaid with platinum. Platinum is also called "white gold," and is a silvery color.

Icon

    The next step is to set the line width. Hit CHANGELW . Right click and select Prior. This tells CC2 to choose the last items it modified, or drew. Both the All and Prior options are only available before you make a selection when working with any command. Your two circles are now selected. Since color 250 is very close to the grey used to show selection, look down at the command prompt. If you were successful, it will show "Select Entities (2 picked) [Dialoge]:". If it does not show this, right click, chose cancel and start again, only this time pick the circles normally. Right click, Do It. You will see a crosshair appear. The command prompt will read "New line width [0"]:". You can enter the width in one of two ways.

     1)you can click the crosshairs anywhere, and draw the width.

     2)you can do it the easy way, and type in the desired width.

     I recommend typing it, it leaves less room for error. Now, when typing, the measures are decimal units in inches or feet (or meters, if you're into the metric system). The abbreviation for inches is " (as in 5" = 5 inches), and the one for feet is ' (as in 5' = 5 feet). Type 2", and hit Enter.

     You should now have a display that looks like four circles. This is because we have not changed the Fill Style of the circles yet. Select CHANGEFS , then right click, Prior. You should now have selected two entities (Not sure? Look at the command prompt!). Right click, do it. Your command prompt now reads "Fill style name [dialoge]:". You could right click and get a fancy dialoge to select the fill style on, but we will type "Solid". This changes the fill style to solid. Now you have two, thick, gray circles.

     OK, these two gray circles are great, but colors tend to run together when you zoom out far enough. To maintain color seperation, you need to outline them. This is typically done in black (color 0). Two ways exist to do this.

     The first is the standard outline command found in CC2. OUTLINEB creates a copy of the selected entities in color 0 (black), and fill style hollow. While effective, this increases the number of entities found in a symbol by 1 for every entity outlined this way. The more entities in the symbol, the longer it takes to redraw them, and ultimately, the map they are on. This is not a good thing, especially when you have a slow computer. However, when dealing with color 31/varicolor entities, this is the best method for outlining. It may also be necessary in some other situations.

     The second, and the one I recommend, is by changing an entities color 1 property, but not it's color 2 property. Sounds like tech speak to you? Here's the explanation. Each entity actually has two color values. Color 1 is the color the edge (or outline) has. This color is almost always visible (there is one case where it is not, but we will not cover that now). The second is the color of the filled area. By manipulating these properties, we can make outlines while keeping the number of entities to a minimum. Type OUTLINE2, then enter. Now right click, Prior. Right click, Do It. At the command prompt, you will see "Color [dialog]:". Type 0. Enter.You will now see that your circles have a black outline.

     Hypothetically speaking, if you wanted to change the color of these entities, you have two options. Only one is going to really work. The first is CHANGEC , which will only change color 1 properties. This would change the color of your outline, only. Or, you can use the CHANGEC2 command. This will change the color of the color 2 property. To my knowledge, this is the only way to change the color 2 property.

     OK, with our two outlined, gray circles, you probably think we're done, right? Heavens no! Those are just two plain circles, and we want a cool looking Summoners Circle! What can we do to spice this circle up? Well, we could do complicated runes, or funny writing around the circle. But every would-be summoner has those! We want something that shows our summoner was a pro! Here's some ideas:

     1)Foot prints in the circle

     2)Lightning or cracks

     3)Smoke from the circle, maybe the foot prints, or even the cracks

     Now do those ideas sound more like what you want to see when you enter a summoners lab? I hope so, because we're going to draw all three! But we're going to do it next time!

     For the moment, your work area should look something like this.