The Beta phase is going well with a lot of valuable feedback from the testers. Several bugs have been squashed and refinements made to the interface to make using Arcane Mapper more intuitive. Of course there is still a lot of work left to do.
On the large scale, several features are still in progress for the intial EA release – the tiled lighting system to improve performance and allow huge maps, door and stair systems, a system to make finding assets to use in your maps easier and of course Steam Workshop support.
However, in addition to fixes and refinements, several smaller features have been implemented recently.
Adjustable Ambient Color and Background Color – using these features it is possible to change the background color for the map and independently change the ambient color – rather than just the intensity. This gives you more control on the coloration of your maps, very useful for setting the right mood.
Here you can see I adjusted the Background Color, making it a saturated and dark blue color while changing the Ambient Color to help integrate the map.
Of course changing the background color isn’t always enough on its own – which is why you can also set a background image. This image has its own Tint Color, offset and scale.
Here you can see I used a Render of a different map as the background and used the Tint Color to darken it and tint is slightly blue to make sure its clear what is background and what is foreground.
Later you will be able to layer maps and choose only to show the background in certain areas – such as holes in the floor or the bottom of pits, allowing you to simulate a multi-level structure with very little work.
Arcane Mapper is about a week away from its first Limited Beta release (testers have already been selected). In preparation this small map was prepared, that will be included with the Beta, that shows some of the features of the tool.
The obvious thing that stands out is the lighting. Smooth falloff and shadows are generated automatically by the tool and ambient occlusion from walls and objects helps ground the objects and highlight their shapes.
Next are the different room shapes, some are simple and some more intricate and interesting. Curved and irregular walls are coming - but in the meantime even the basic straight walls can produce interesting rooms.
Raised areas, such as in the throne room and pits are on display, notice the slight blue fog in the smaller pit and the deep black fog in the bottom room.
And finally a feature I haven't shown yet but that has been present for quite some time, the ability to change the wall height per room - you will notice the tall walls in the top left room and the very short walls in the room below that. No matter what height you choose, you still get full lighting, shadows and Ambient Occlusion with your walls.
Many other features and bug fixes have occured since the last update - click and drag to scroll the map view around in a precise manner, many UI fixes, PDF export support - including automatically breaking up the map to fit the selected page size (sizes include Letter, Legal, A3, A4, A5, B4, etc.) and margins and a lot of other polish in preparation for the Beta and ultimately release.
