Today we are releasing our first update of the work package “Advanced Prop Editing”.
As you might remember we asked you what advanced prop editing features you would like to have implemented.
So we sat down and started to implement those new features.
To give you the short version first: DONE.
But we decided that we don’t want to stop just there.
One feedback we often get is, that there could be more props. And honestly - who am I to disagree? There can always be more props. Moooaaar props! And while we are constantly adding more DUNGEONFOG props to the library and are increasing the quota for personal uploads, we figured, that there could be an additional solution to that problem:
Colorize Props
We have implemented a new feature that allows you to take full control over the colorization of each prop no matter if they are from the DUNGEONFOG library or uploaded by you personally.
If you have ever worked with photoshop or gimp you might know how powerful color adjustments can be.
You need a blue merchant cart? or a red one? Or both?
All curtains should be white? The banners in the mighty clan hall should be green instead of blue?
You can now adjust the hue, saturation, lightness and transparency of each prop.
Now that we have worked this out, we are going to do the same for textures in a future update.
Advanced Randomizer
We have improved our randomize options and added
- range settings for rotation & scale
- random flipping
as interchangeable options for prop placement.
Duplicate props
When it comes to quickly filling a room with props, nothing is faster then just taking existing ones from other rooms and duplicate them for the new room - except probably the feature that will be discussed in the next paragraph below.
By pressing CTRL+D you can now duplicate props including all their settings (like color, scale, rotation and mirror directions).
We had a long discussion about whether to use Copy/Cut/Paste or Duplicate and we argued that having to press one key-combination (CTRL+D) instead of two (CTRL+C, CTRL+V) should be more efficient in the long run and would oughtweight the minor advanatge of "being used to copy/paste". Let us know what you think!
Group props
As with our rooms, you can now create prop groups.
Simply create a folder in your layers list and collect your props there.
You can
- name your groups
- rotate them
- scale them
- and most importantly you can duplicate whole groups.
We have also implemented, that as long as you are “inside” a group, all new props will be added directly to that group.
We have also addressed the “feature” (yeah ok it was a bug, but it was useful) that a prop is always moved on top of other props as soon as you select & move it. Props now keep their position in their sorting order.
The only downside is, that this new feature shows how incredibly useful multi-select would be, so we have shifted this task in our tracker up and will address this as soon as we have finished our advanced prop editing features.
Arrow keys and more
We have added a ton of new shortcuts and hotkeys to improve the workflow:
While you have selected a prop:
- Arrow keys | To move the prop
- SHIFT+Arrow | To move props by pixels
- CTRL+D | Duplicate
- ALT+Click | Select the prop below
A quick-help to access a list of all hotkeys is already in the making and will be released with our next update.
What’s next
We still have some cool things up the sleeves that we want to address before we move on to the next work package “Advanced GM-Notes”. We are planning to release some minor things like the quick help and other smaller things within the next week and then have a final major update for our prop package by the end of August.
Have fun testing and as always, let the dice roll!
Till
