New Update: Improved Room-Drawing, Move Rooms & New Interface for MyMaps
almost 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 02:31:50 PM

With today's update we have moved another step closer to finish our work package
"Advanced Editor Features - Rooms". 

Improved room drawing

Over the past updates we closely watched how you create rooms. We realized that our snap-to-wall mechanic is not performing as we expected, but rather limiting your experience when it comes to combinations of different rooms or room-in-room scenarios.

On the other hand, the room layers were hardly used at all, due to the fact, that they had almost no impact on how rooms behave depending on their position in the sorting list.

The goal should be, that you quickly and intuitively draw your map layout without having to think of possible barriers. And with curved walls now added to the mix, our snap-to-wall mechanic was not optimal anymore.

So we re-worked our tools to make the experience easier to grasp and less complex when dealing with intersecting walls and rooms.

Here are the changes:

1) Drawing rooms now pays more attention to the order in which you draw rooms.

The idea is, that you can now draw rooms more fluid and without having to think "How do I have to draw that room when keeping wall intersections in mind". We have re-worked our editor to interpret what you are doing and to draw those intersections automatically.

 2) Our snap-to-wall mechanic is still there, but acts now as a recommendation instead of a limiter.

When you reach an intersecting wall, our snap-to-wall mechanic suggests the wall as a possible snap location, but doesn't prevent you from drawing into the intersecting room anymore.

3) Layers have now gained importance in the order that rooms are rendered.

To help you identify the right room in your layers-list, we have added a highlight when you hover with your mouse over the layer-list. 

Depending on the sorting order, the rooms are now rendered accordingly.

Beware: Impact on old maps

Now that we have applied this changes to the editor, we have also updated you existing maps to work with those changes. There are now over 4000 maps in the database and updating or reviewing every map manually is not an option anymore. Our update script did its best to update them properly, but there is a chance, that your map layout was more complex, than our script was able to handle. So please review your old maps and if a room looks broken, fix it manually or delete and re-draw it.

New Feature: Move Rooms

We have also implemented our new feature: Move Rooms.  

When you select a room, you now get a move handler around every room point. By selecting this handler you can now drag rooms around your map.

The snap to grid always reacts to the point you have selected, allowing you to place complex rooms more precisely.

If you want to deactivate snap-to-grid, you can hold down the SHIFT-Key (⇧ + Mouse)
while dragging your room.

You can watch the video showcasing all the newly implemented features here:

New Interface for MyMaps

Now that you create more and more maps, our old interface for the MyMaps section of the platform started to get confusing. We are currently in the process of updating this section, giving you a more intuitive interface to work with.

With the new interface you can easily preview your maps, rename them and organize them. This should help keeping a better overview and make your "MyMap" section a lot more organized than before.

We are currently in the process of finalizing it, so there will be a separated update to the platform within the next days.

What's next?

With those changes implemented, we now go into the final phase of advanced room editing, before we finally shift over to advanced prop handling. Now that we have those new features implemented we need to address those changes in the GM-Notes, allowing you to create room-groups for notes as well as a new mechanic to help you adjust room textures and settings faster throughout several rooms of a map.

We expect to release the next update within the next 14 days, so stay tuned!

Until then, have fun testing and
Let the dice roll!
Till

New Update Released: Curves!
almost 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 12:12:30 PM

There have been a lot of great updates in the past months, but I think this one is the most-anticipated so far! From today on, you can now add curves and create rounded rooms, rounded caves or add rounded sections to your walls!  

Since there is a lot to talk about, I have splitted this Kickstarter update into two sections: 

• How to add curves in the editor
• Behind the scenes - An excursion into the concepts behind this update
  

Let’s start!

How to add curves in the editor

You can now edit your wall segments even further and create curved walls. 

How do I create a curve? To add curves to your walls, you can now select each wall-segment and adjust it: 

Every segment has now three options to do so: Straight, Circle and Curve.  

What is the difference between circle and curve? 
When you select “circle”, the tool will always bend the segment to fit a perfect circle. 

To adjust the segment to your needs, you can manipulate the radius of that circle either by dragging the circle-handler on the stage, or by entering the radius manually in the panel. With this you can always make sure, that your room, or parts of it form a smooth round circle. 

When you select “curves” you get the regular bézier handlers that can be adjusted to create more complex curves than just a circle. 

While working with bézier curves, you can also select wall-sgement-points to smooth them and connect bézier handlers to gain more control over smoothed curves. 

For now, you have adjust each segment separately, but we are keeping tabs on tools that allow you to draw round or oval rooms from scratch. (See more about this below).

Behind the scenes - “Stay a while and listen”

Having curved walls in DUNGEONFOG was something that we always knew was essential for our success. There are only a handful of other game master tools out there that provide curved walls as a dedicated drawing tool. 

And there is a reason for that: Working with curves as a programmer comes with a ton of road bumps. Where you already have a great amount of edge-cases with straight walls, intersecting walls, rooms above and below other rooms, wall detection and all sorts of other things, those troubles can easily grow exponentially once Mr. Bézier enters the stage.   

But that's just the programming. Most of you will likely have experienced bézier curves before. Those little gremlins can be nasty when you try to make them do your bidding. And nothing is more annoying than wasting your time on overly complex micro-adjustments. 

Our goal will always be to help you improve your preparation time. Once we had the math worked out and the programming ready, we needed to think of ways to make it as simple as possible for you, so that you don’t waste your precious time on fiddling around with bézier handlers.  

Before we started, we sat down and did the same we did with rooms - we tried to understand curved walls from a conceptual point of view.  

We came up with three premises:  

• Curves improve the immersion of a map. In terms of battlemaps - curves are a map creator’s choice, but not inevitably necessary for a game to run if your use your map as a battlemap. In fact, most in-game discussions I had regarding maps, spacing and placement where thanks to rounded walls. So from a conceptual point of view, they can be understood as an aesthetic improvement more than a mechanic one.  
  
  
• Adding curved walls is part of the refinement of a map. There have been lot's of discussions about this internally. How do you approach a map? How do design it?
  We came to the conclusion that, although you might already know that there will be curved walls in your room, the first thing you do is, you map that room with straight walls. That is usually a lot faster, since it helps you to create the basic layout of the room first, before you start working on the details.
  
  
• Our tools should always be fast to learn and easy to handle. We want to keep map creation a fast process and the choice to add curves should be optional and based on the time you are willing to invest.  

Paying heed to those premises was very important to us and the reason how and why we introduced our new mechanics to draw curves:

• Tying curves to segment adjustments allows you to quickly create the layout of your room, before you work on the details. We don't want to force bézier curves on you and we don`t want you to be held up with unnecessary micro-adjustments, while you are still in the process of layouting your map.
  
  
• Adding circles is easy to learn and even faster to use. If you don’t want to delve into complex curvatures you just select a segment and make it round. The program will do the work for you. I assume that this will fit 90% of the expectations towards rounded walls on maps.
  
  
• If you want to do more than that, you are most likely willing to invest more time into map creation, thus beziér curves will additionally fit the needs of advanced map creators.

I completely (now more than ever) understand, why most other developers step back from that endeavor and stick with simple pre-made rounded floor-tiles. From all tools, features and improvements, adding curved walls to our editor was by far the most complex task in this project. But it was definitely worth it and it is also definitely another step forward to set DUNGEONFOG apart from all the other game master tools out there!

I am very happy with the result and although we are aware that there is still space for improvements, I think our approach is a great way to satisfy your need to add rounded walls to your maps.

What’s next?  

Now that we have added round walls, there are things that we need to adjust/finish, before we close the work package “walls”. With the complexity of curves added to the mix, we need to revisit our snap-to-wall mechanic and our approach to room-in-room situations since things can get really confusing when working with curved walls on a bigger, more complex map.

Another update is planned for next week and will come with major changes to the way we handle rooms, wall detection and layers. I will talk more about that, once we have released the changes.

After that, we will close our work package "Advanced Room Handling" and continue with the next work package "Advanced Prop Handling".

Until then - have fun testing and as always:

Let the dice roll!
Till

Platform Update: Private Sharing and other improvements
almost 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 05:42:22 PM

Today we have released the new feature "share with a friend" for the platform, together with some requested features and some minor bugfixes.

Private Sharing

You now have the option to share maps with your friends, without making a map public to everyone. Although we would love to to have all maps always public for everyone, we are aware that there are occasions, where you don’t want a map to be visible for everyone.

You can now create a private share link and send it to your friends, so they can clone the map to their account. You can also manage those links in your profile, in case you want to prevent that link from working anymore.

Other improvements

• Stay logged in - We have finally found the bug that prevented you from staying logged in. 
• Change email - We have added the option to change you email address in your profile. 
• Clone preview images - We have fixed a bug that prevented you from having a preview image of your cloned maps. 
• Asset Library in German - We are currently updating all assets to be available in german too. 
• Discord preview - We replaced the discord preview on the dashboard with a widget to show who is currently in our DUNGEONFOG discord.

What's next?

For those who haven't joined us on Discord yet: We are about to release a big update next week: Curves. 

We are currently hunting down the last bugs and are in the process of preparing everything for the upcoming update. Since this new update will be huge - not only in terms of capabilities, but also in terms of programming, we are going to split the update into two separated releases.

Part 1 - Curves
The first release will bring the curves tool next monday. 
I will go into details and also give some insight into the development process next week, when I release the Kickstarter update.

Part 2 - Improvements
The second part will follow a week later and will address many other parts of the editor that have to be adapted and optimized to improve the handling of walls, rooms and more. 

If everything goes as expected it will also be our final release for the work package "rooms". We will then start with the next work-package "advanced prop handling".

Have fun testing & let the dice roll!

Till

Shout-out to YARPS: www.yarps.net/kickstarter

If you haven't checked out YARPS yet - this is a very interesting Kickstarter project that is still ongoing for the next 10 days. They have released some great videos last week where they show the potential of their tool. We think: The more tools available to make a game master's life easier, the better - so check them out and support them if you like what you see.

New Update: CAVES! (And more).
almost 8 years ago – Mon, May 28, 2018 at 10:07:10 PM

The new update that we have released today comes with a lot of major and minor improvements as well as some bugfixes. But most importantly: 

You can now create caves! 

1) Draw a cave by selecting the room tool and choose the new option "cave".

As you can see, you can also reshuffle the cave walls and adjust outer- and inner wall thickness.

2) You can also select wall segments and apply a cave effect to them

Simply select a wall segment by clicking on it and choose if you want to apply an inner- or outer cave effect.

New Flavor-Props "Cave", "Fire" and "Traps".

To round things up, we have added new flavor prop sets for caves and fire.

Since we already have the trap-props, we didn't want to keep them from you - but please keep in mind, that we will apply changes to them as soon as we address the traps and hidden objects mechanic.

Dashboard, Discord and Asset Browser

You will also notice, that when you log in, you now have a dashboard that shows you your latest maps, new maps that have been made public by other users, and general news (like patch notes, new propsets and so on).

Join us in Discord!

You will also notice a discord button where you can join us on discord, share your stories, chat with the community and exchange about your maps. We hope to see you there soon!

Asset Browser

If you want to know what assets are currently available in DUNGEONFOG, you now have the option to browse all assets directly from the platform.

Another great tool for game master - check it out!

There is a new, exciting project on Kickstarter, that we want to plug here:

We support YARPS because we strongly believe that GMs should be able to fully concentrate on creating great worlds and stories, leaving the workload to sophisticated digital tools. YARPS and DUNGEONFOG perfectly complement each other and we are looking forward to unite the strengths of both tools via suitable interfaces.

So if you want to support them, just follow the link here.

DUNGEONFOG wins RPC Fantasy Award 2018
almost 8 years ago – Wed, May 16, 2018 at 03:14:03 PM

We are incredibly proud to announce, that DUNGEONFOG was awarded with the RPC Fantasy Award in the category "Most Promising Product 2018".

The whole convention was a great adventure and an unforgettable experience for us! 

We had the opportunity to chat with hundreds of players, game masters and map enthusiasts, share stories and collect feedback. 

And since none of this would have been possible without your support - here is a big THANK YOU! to all of you. 

I know it is just a small gesture, but I asked Steven (you might know him as eXaminator from the forum) as one of you awesome backers, if he would be ok to act as a representative for all of you.

If you want to see more pictures from the RPC, as well as some video footage (coming soon) visit our news section at https://www.dungeonfog.com/news/

Let the dice roll!
Till