Hello everyone! We've just launched the Winter Wonderland update to all our users. Whether you want to trek across vast ice fields in the north, scale snowy mountaintops or explore that haunted forest that suddenly froze overnight: we've got you covered! The Winter Wonderland update comes with a new snow terrain type, a snow weather effect that can be applied to all your existing maps, 584 new objects, a video export feature, special effects and tons of other quality-of-life improvements. As a bonus, we overhauled the entire AI to produce much, much better results. We'll walk you through them in this update, but first: the trailer! [previewyoutube=cGkMIggInzE;full][INSERT TRAILER][/previewyoutube]

Snow Terrain

You can now pick "snow" as a terrain type when creating your map. But that is not all: you can also add a snow overlay to any map you create. The snow overlay will cover any outside objects in a thick layer of snow, for that ultimate winter look! You can even apply the snow effect to your existing maps!

Video Export

You can now export a 30s looped video of your map! This will greatly increase immersion as your players will be able to travel across flowing rivers, water wheels and forests full of gently swaying trees. Check out the video below for an example of a video export. [previewyoutube=3Lg0W6b56kA;full][/previewyoutube] Special Effects A long-requested feature is the ability to add special effects to the maps. And now you can! Add fire, smoke, fireflies, necrotic fog or other exotic effects and really personalize your world. And of course, use video export afterwards to show them to your players in fully animated glory!

Multiple Liquid Types

Previously, only standard water was available in Dungeon Alchemist. No longer! We added frozen water, muddy water, lava and more! You can even combine them on the same map.

Customizable Abstract Objects

We added a set of fully customisable abstract shapes, that allow you to add any texture to them. This is an easy way to create a wall that is not available yet, or that specific floor tile you really wanted. If you get creative, you could build entire rooms out of your own customised objects!

AI Improvements

We've been aware for a while that the AI was lacking in certain parts and could be greatly improved. So we spent a lot of time looking at its shortcomings and trying to remedy them. The AI is not perfect yet, but we do think it's improved greatly. We rewrote almost every aspect of the AI-system, but these are some things you will immediately notice when generating a new room:

• Doors are placed more logically. They are centered when it makes sense, and doors will be larger for larger rooms. We also added logic to discern "front doors" and doors between interior rooms.
• Windows are much less random and more symmetric. The type of window is also matched to the wall it spawns in for a more consistent look.
• Walls of adjacent rooms try to match each other. The outside wall of a building remains the same, even when the interior one changes. See-through walls such as dungeon cell walls now only spawn where they logically would, even when you place a dungeon cell inside of or next to an existing room.
• Columns now only spawn for larger rooms and always spawn in a logical way relative to the room layout.
• Structured rooms such as chapels and throne rooms now generate in a much more appropriate way, resulting in far more structured, sensible room placements.
• Objects that should spawn logically in the center of the room will now do so. Same for objects that should spawn logically on the opposite side of the door, such as thrones.
• Objects that usually exist in a specific layout (for example, church benches) will now always spawn that way.
• Lots of subtle less noticeable improvements to the way objects spawn in relation to each other.

Other Improvements

There are quite a few other improvements in this update. You can always find all of them in the Help > News screen in Dungeon Alchemist, but we'll summarize the most important ones here:

• A tooltip now appears when you draw a room to indicate how large the room is. You can also see the map size when hovering over the corners of the map.
• Added AI settings to the refresh button in the Select Room menu, allowing you to refresh only the objects, for example.
• Improved the search to show more relevant search results on top.
• We added a freely placeable version of every wall (previously, there was only one type).
• Improved the looks of the trees and added subtle animations to them. Especially the broadleaf trees received a considerable quality upgrade.

So, What's Next?

This update was postponed a few times because we underestimated the time it would take to overhaul the AI. We understand that this can be frustrating to people, but we've always tried to keep a high standard with regards to our updates. We only want to release a stable, fully featured update when it's completely finished. That's why we'd rather postpone an update than release a half-finished part of it. We'll try to be more careful about announcing features too early for the next update, so that we won't have to postpone another update in the future. When we're ready, we'll be announcing more info and sharing updates about our progress on our Discord, Reddit and Twitter account. Follow us there for weekly teasers, videos and awesome content! Yours in cartomancy, The Dungeon Alchemist Team

[ 2023-01-31 10:00:42 CET ] [ Original post ]