Early Access Update 1

It has been just over a week since the last update of Arcane Mapper, a big update has been in development. The first build listed in Upcoming Builds was released on May 7 and the "Tiled lighting" build has been in progress since then.

So what can you expect from the build?

• Improved performance when using many lights in a map.
• A light scale in addition to color and range, allowing for much brighter lights.
• Support for larger maps with proper lighting (up to 200x200 units/cells currently vs. 50x50 in the public version). Obviously larger maps will require more memory.
• Per frame update limits to avoid stalls and drops in performance when manipulating many objects or changing a lot of the map at once (like adjusting global lighting settings).
• Working quality settings which can be adjusted so lower end systems will run better while still having lighting and shadows.
• Per-tile rendering with quality control when Rendering out images. This will allow Arcane Mapper to generate very large images by increasing the Pixels Per Unit when rendering out your map. This will be great for printing, for example a 50x50 map at 300 Pixels Per Unit will generate a 15,000 x 15,000 pixel image.
• Quality settings when rendering out your maps to images, to allow for sharper shadows, higher quality antialiasing and other image quality features when exporting.
• Render preview with the ability to limit the area rendered - so you don't need to move parts of your map around when you only want to export a limited area.
• Shadow fixes for Intel Integrated Graphics.
• Other lighting improvements.

When can you expect it?
Obviously predicting dates for major changes like this is error prone, so any dates given are subject to change. However this release is expected to be complete within the next 2 weeks.