Upcoming Builds

In this post, I will talk about the upcoming near-term builds for Arcane Mapper. I'm hoping this will encourage you (the community) to discuss which of these features are most important to you? Which would you like to see sooner rather than later? Are there important editing features that are missing that you think Arcane Mapper really needs?

Obviously this doesn't include any of the Virtual Tabletop plans, in this post we are only talking about editing and map creation features. This list is also not exhaustive, it merely includes the near term plans.

These next two builds are almost certainly going to happen in order - but if additional bugs or issues come up they may be added.

Basic Fixes & Improvements

• Issue: cut/copy + paste should work between layers.
• Issues: Layer Up/Down should work with multi-select.
• Bug: crashes should not occur when deleting Library items.
• Bug: copy&paste rooms crashes.
• UI: Add the ability to set the default floor and wall textures.
• UI: Add the ability to set the default wall height.

Tiled lighting
This build was meant to come out right after release along with other changes but it got sidelined to fix more important compatibility issues and bugs.

• The improved lighting system that has been in the works for a while that dramatically improves performance and allows much larger maps to be lit with good performance.

These builds are the near term major "feature builds" in no particular order.

Better Fog

• Fog for normal rooms (not just pits).
• Fog lit and shadowed by light sources.
• Fog properly affecting objects with a smooth falloff around them to simulate objects sticking out of the fog.
• "Patchy" fog - allow the fog to be patchy and whispy with settings - to avoid the uniform look.
• Blending between rooms - so a fogged room room can sit next to a clear room and still look plausible.

Basic Editing Improvements

• Floor/wall UI improvements: Scale/Offset/Rotation.
• The ability to quickly place many objects with random rotations and scales (within margins specified).
• Curves for walls.
• Natural walls - draw normal straight walls but be able to turn them into natural looking cave/rock walls of various roughness levels to easily create natural caves and similar environments.
• Rough floors - give height to floors for visual purposes, such as simulating rough cave floors, gentle slopes or exterior terrain.
• Texture blending to avoid unwanted harsh transitions.

Procedural Enhancements

• Procedural liquids - fill pits with water, lava, slime and other liquids. Control the look, add reflections, muck and other elements.
• Procedural grime, dirt, moss and other elements - fill in the cracks with grime and dirt, have moss grow in corners, add spider webs in less used corners. You will be able to dictate where these details go and control them - but the system will generate the details.

Door System

• Create doors that naturally connect to the walls, no matter the height.
• Control the state of the doors, open them up to any point.
• Different types of doors - single, double, jail cell bars, sci-fi.

Stair System

• Create stairs with the tool that automatically work with the environment.
• Choose different types - straight, curved, spiral, different step heights, etc.

Multi-level / Exterior Support

• Layer maps together and make areas transparent to see into maps below.
• Support exteriors, including lighting (sunlight, skylight), texturing and which level of each building is visible.
• Seamless transition between exterior and interior. Make dungeons that are partially exteriors, build street and city scenes.