New World Map Editor (Polygons!!!) + Ace 1.5.1
World Map Editor
World builders, this one is for you! It is hard to believe how far you guys were able to stretch the old world building tools - you really built some insane stuff! Seeing all of your creations inspired us to put in some elbow grease and give you the editor you guys deserve. You’ll now be able to create the jagged shapes of your cast away island, curves of a river, or the narrow streets of your ancient city!
Thanks to @Steffany868 for the screenshots of her world!
Polygon Support
You can now create areas in all sorts of shapes and sizes! Our new draw tool allows you to draw polygons by clicking dots, or click and hold to draw any shape you like.
Performance
Really large worlds now perform much better in the new map editor. You should be able to load really large worlds and edit them with minimal lag!
New UI
I know everyone is used to the way the old editor works and this one one comes with quite a bit of change, but please give it a chance! We had to make a lot of these changes to support the new complexities of the editor. Things are much simpler when you’re only dealing with rectangles. Some key updates:
Forms will now show up in the sidebar on the right so you don’t lose sight of the map
New action bar and tools
New movement, resize, and selection modes. Oh, and there’s area rotation too!
Search for entities by clicking the Search button in the top right
View world info / launch a campaign from the globe button
Tool tips in the bottom right
We will be posting a video in the next couple of days to show you how it all works!
Appearances
You can now add appearances for areas and POIs. These will heavily influence the image generation!
Area Spawns
We took away the ability to add monsters directly on areas - it doesn’t quite make sense to let you do that because it’s actually quite hard to travel through an area and bump into the coordinates where a monster exists. Here’s how we’re thinking about it now:
If you want to drop specific monster tokens, you should be doing so at a POI. POIs are where players snap to, so anything interesting like a pivotal BBEG should be at a POI.
Areas are now more for travel and an organization to keep your POIs cohesive. You can add monsters with a spawn rate to areas, which are used to give travel a sense of danger & make the area feel more immersive as you can spawn monsters/creatures that are fitting of the area.
Tips for interacting with the new editor
Hold shift to pan from any tool
By default clicking and dragging will pan. Clicking an entity will select it. Clicking and dragging a selected entity will move that entity instead of panning. If you want to lock a specific tool, you can select it from the tool bar.
Holding shift while resizing or rotating will lock the aspect ratio / chunk the rotation in 15 deg increments.
To select a character that is at a POI, select the POI and then select the character from the sidebar, or search the character in the sidebar and then select them. When a character is selected, they will pop out of the POI cluster and be available to move anywhere.
You can edit existing vertices on an area. Click an area once to select. Click it again to enter vertices mode. Click an existing vertices to delete it, or drag it to move it.
On mobile you can rotate areas with two fingers
Cmd + z to undo your changes
Notes
Resizing / moving areas will now automatically move anything inside of the area by default. If you want to move the area without disturbing the tokens on the area, you can lock the POIs and Characters in the map settings.
Ace 1.5.1
Fixed issue where character aliases were being generated as new characters
Fixed issue where characters and POIs were being generated even if the generation settings were turned off
Fixed an issue where Franz would generate characters when talking to a monster
Fixed an issue where Franz would not read monster appearances
Fixed an issue where character voices were not working in narration.
Other Bug Fixes & Improvements
World description limit increased to 500 characters from 100 characters
Added remove + download buttons on image pickers
Removed WASD panning on map editor (please let us know if this is missed)
What’s next?
Regarding next updates for the world map editor, you can check out the World Map Editor Roadmap. We have more features + QoL updates planned!
We have the memories upgrade under way and it will be the next big update! We're also spending some time cleaning up bugs and improving general stability (If you run into any issues during a campaign, please make sure to include campaign/event IDs and we'll get to it as soon as we can). We know some things like trope reduction have also regressed, so we're working on improving those things as well. Stay tuned and thanks for playing everyone! We're excited to see what you all make with the new map tools!