January Update

Happy New Year! Since the last update, I added drag & drop movement, updated the interface designs, upgraded the backend grid system, and made a ton of fixes and refinements.

Drag & Drop Movement

After I integrated Hero Forge compatibility, I wanted to be able to drag and drop minis, so I added in drag & drop movement. It’s simple, hold left-click on a character or prop, and then drag the object to a new position. Boom, dragged and dropped.

When dragging an object over a position already occupied, a red outline will appear. Attempting to drop an object over an invalid position will reset the object back to its original position.

When selecting multiple units (shift + click), you can drag while holding shift to move all selected objects! Remember that dropping any object over an invalid position will reset it back to its original position.

UI Design Updates

I spent some time updating some color schemes, layouts, and other design-related parts of Battle Map Studio to increase readability. You’ll probably notice some colors are a little darker, some panels are a little transparent, and the text might be easier to read.

Polish

Most of my focus since the last update was on testing, fixing, and refining. I had a few big breakthroughs with rendering performance updates, and did a lot of good work on Battle Map Studio’s backend grid system.

Here are the list of changes, fixes, and upgrades:

• Significantly improved the health bar system code by translating to burstable jobs.

• Reworked how blocks are rendered to improve render performance.

• Changed Deisolate hotkey from G to U.

• Changed Layer transform gizmo toggle hotkey from Y to G.

• Changed the Raycast Targets hotkey from Z to Y and enabled the toggle during selection.

• Removed the hotkey for ignoring raycasting targets during selection (was previously hold shift, but was problematic since it interfered with append hotkey).

• Improved the loader bar status when assets are being deserialized during map load.

• Added a few missing thumbnails.

• Slightly darkened many parts of the UI so text and icons show up better.

• Removed the Report a Bug button from the landing window.

• Added a Report a Bug button to the Help dropdowns.

• Added a Report a Bug button to the Settings window.

• Fixed a bug where assets were not always loaded properly after loading a map with multiple models.

• Fixed a visual bug where custom assets could initialize with incorrect positions, and adjust their positions a little after being placed.

• Fixed a file bug where map file saved date was not saved properly, causing ordering by date not to function properly.

• Fixed a bug where the underlay grid would not update when the grid changed from hex to square, unless the gameplay settings panel was visible.

• Fixed a visual bug where when painting invisible tiles, the target outlines would not appear.

• Fixed a few scaling issues with the Stone Baluster.

• Fixed an indexing issue with the Stone Altars.

• Fixed a visual bug where tiles would not be positioned correctly vertically.

• Fixed a bug with some noise maker materials, where they displayed as solid pink.

• Fixed a visual bug with a snowy stone entrance where the wire door did not animate correctly.

• Fixed a visual bug where some tile materials would not highlight when blocks were selected.

• Fixed a few mismatched button icons.

• Fixed a bug with the minimal nav dropdowns where a variable was not set properly, causing an error.

• Fixed a bug where selecting a unit would not always stick.

• Fixed a bug where invisible blocks were visible when in fog of war.

• Fixed a block where invisible blocks would change tile type when setting them visible in fog of war.

• Fixed a unit visibility bug where placing a unit if it wasn't on the user's team would initialize it as invisible.

• Fixed a bug where units were initialized as invisible when not on a user's team.

• Fixed a visual bug where the displayed team name would not correspond to the unit's team when the unit was on team 1.

• Fixed a bug where colors set as overrides on entity components were not converted to linear space.

• Fixed a visual bug where tiles would not be visible on brush targets while randomized styles was enabled.

Enjoy!

-Bradley