Hello there, Time Travellers!

Oh, you say we had a «Valentine’s day date» planned????

Well, the God of Time did some tricks on us, but better late than never!

After all, It’s only been around 2 weeks since the last update, a 2 day delay isn’t much 😉

Without further ado, here’s the promised update!! Please, sit back and relax as we go over what’s new in Version 1.2.0.

1.- New Medieval Fort & Market Environments!!

The Medieval Fort and Medieval Market environments are finally avaliable! One of the many stretch goals we unlocked thanks to you 🙂

We can’t wait to see what new maps you create with these assets! The best of them will be on our RRSS… because you deserve it! 😀

2.- Get ready for video export!

You can finally export your creations to .mp4 and .webm formats.

Additionally, you can choose the webm video option when exporting to Foundry VTT!

3.- UI Overhaul

We’ve slowly been changing the UI to better fit our new direction in favour of a more user-friendly experience. This update comes fully packed with some very notable changes that we hope you enjoy!

For starters, we changed the «Community» menu and went for a look that’s more consistent with the rest of the UI. We removed the «favourite» option to simplify things and changed all mentions of «Subscribe» to «Save» to better explain how the system worked.

You can also load up a map in a single click now, whereas previously you needed to be subscribed first to see the «load» button.

We are planning some more changes for the entire online system but those will have to wait a bit longer. 😉

Outside of that, we changed multiple other things from the in-game UI:

– Smaller Icons and consistant size across all other menus: We feel the «General options» and «Hide menu» buttons were a tad bit too big so we went ahead and changes those to free up some space in your screen.

– Simplified quick palette: We decided to hide the «Remove item» button from the Quick Palette slots whenever they dont have any item assigned. Simple, right? We did a whole lot more with the Quick Palette, but you’ll read about it later!.

 – Folder menu and Custom folders: Custom folders now have a blue tint in their name to stand apart. The «Add folder» and «Remove folder» buttons have also relocated to free up some space and you’ll only get to see the «Remove folder» button whenever you have selected a custom folder. Oh! The folder menu has also changed in size to fit 5 entries in view at all times.  

4.- Quality of life changes

Continuing with the changes from the last update, we bring you a lot of features that will make your life simpler! These are the kind of things you don’t really notice are there but it truly feels like night and day if you go back to an older version of CB (Errrr…let’s not talk about the past tho).

Here’s a run-down of some of the most important quality of life changes! 

– You now get to see what you are dragging!: Ok, let me explain! From now on, whenever you drag an item over the ui or outside the grid section, you’ll see its icon right under your mouse. This on its own is pretty handy, but wait til you hear about how it interacts with some of the other changes!! 

– Custom folders and custom assets: This is a underutilized feature with a lot of potential and we decided it was probably due to how unintuitive it was. In order to fix this we added tooltips wherever it was possible. There’s also a feedback animation to let you know you can drop the asset if you wish to add it to the selected folder. What do you think? 

– Quick Palette: This UI element also makes use of the same feedback animation mentioned above. Lets keep it consistent! 

– Remove Item Button: Both the quick Palette and custom folders will also make use of this greyout highlight to let you know exactly what you are about to delete. 

– Better Tutorials: We updated them to reflect the most recent changes and new tools that have been added since release. This felt like a «Must-have» to help ease new players into map making! We are considering to add video demos showcasing the functionality of each tool but that was outside the scope of this update. Let us know if that’s something you’d like to see!

5.- Performance Improvements

As we promised in the last update, we bring you some more performance improvements that will be specially felt when switching from tool menus, specially the props, structure and autobuilder tool.

We also noticed some stutters while going through the tutorials. Those should be gone now.

Hooray for a smoother experience!!!

6.- What’s next?

The current plan is to release a big update a month from now, including new environments and some long needed changes, such as: multi-item support in the tweaks menu, the option to allow/block editing of your online maps, autobuilder improvements and more!

A lot of things can happen in a month but worry not, you’ll hear from us way before that! We are sticking to our plan to release a status update every 2 weeks, so see you around the end of February for another Kickstarter update where we’ll talk more in depth about what’s coming!

7.- Shoutout to the community!

At the end of the day, its because of you that we keep going and improving Chronos Builder.

We are incredibly grateful for this community that has been patient and communicative with us!

We know there’s still a long road of things we want to change before this becomes the ultimate map maker, but know for certain that we won’t let you down! We have come a long way since the release of the project :).

It is because of this that we’d like to take a moment to feature some of our favourite creations from the community!  

 Industrial map by «Incredibad Gamer».

Concept map by «Rage».

Castle Volkov map by «Commander».

These are all incredible!! 

We are always trying to 1up you whenever we prepare new maps for an update but you set the bar so damn high!! You all make us so jealous with your skills!! 

(Oh and…we get it…you all love Cyberpunk and Sci-Fi maps ;P )

Finally, we’d also like to give a big shoutout to the youtube channel «RPG Elite«, who has already made quite a few tutorials on Chronos Builder and helped many newcomers learn the ropes.  

(As a side note, its a bit crazy how this video isn’t even a month old and some of the features have changed so much since then. Chronos is growing fast!)

You can check the rest of the CB playlist here : https://tinyurl.com/ChronosBuilderPlaylist

8.- So…about those exclusive asset keys…

Remember those exclusive portrait assets we mentioned in the last update? The ones exclusive to some backers with custom textures? Well, quickly after the last update we started sending out keys to everyone but it seems we made an oopsie and sent wrong keys…

For that, we’d like to apologize. We are still learning the intricacies of Steam and things like this happen. 

But worry not, as we will start sending correct keys as soon as possible!

9.- Patch Notes

Ver 1.2.0

Additions:

• Added “Medieval Fort” and “Medieval Market” environments! 
• Added tutorial windows for all tools and systems added since release. 
• The entire Tutorial can be skipped by pressing “Esc”. 
• Individual tutorial windows can be skipped by pressing “Space”. 
• Added UI feedback whenever an item is added to the Quick Palette. 
• Added UI feedback whenever an item is removed from a custom folder or the Quick Palette. 
• Added multiple tooltips to help explain UI functions. 
• Added multiple tooltips to help explain saving custom grouped assets. 
• Item icons are shown as they are being dragged over the UI or outside the grid bounds. 
• Quick Palette “Delete” buttons will remain invisible while no item has been assigned to said slot. 
• Custom folders now have their own text color to stand apart from legacy folders. 
• “Delete custom folder” button is now only visible whenever a custom folder is selected. 
• “Subscribe” actions in the “Community” section have been renamed to “Save”. 
• “Open” button is now always visible in the “Community> Map details” menu. If a map is opened before the user decides to save it, the system will automatically save it first. 
• Added option to export a map to .mp4 and .webm formats. 
• Added option to record a .webm video instead of an image for Foundry VTT exports. 
• You can now choose multiple types of floors and walls in Advanced Options of Autobuilder. 
• Autobuilder function has been improved with new custom settings.

        Item density slider – Determines how many items are spawned in the room.

        Semi-Structured props – Makes sure some props (Chairs, Stools, etc.) will all be the same in order to give rooms some integrity.

        Sequential Structure mode – Floors and walls will be placed in sequential order instead of being randomly placed.

Fixes:

• Fixed an error that would cause the maximum grid size to extend beyond the terrain plane. 
• Fixed an error that would cause assets to appear on the center of the world for a single frame whenever they are being placed by the user. 
• Uniform use of the word “Sci-Fi” across the entire game. 
• Improved performance when switching to Props or Structure tools. 
• Fixed an error that would cause tutorial windows to be skipped whenever the user pressed any button. 
• Improved performance during tutorials. 
• Horizontal menu will remain in collapsed mode during tutorials. 
• Fixed an error that would show item spawn tooltips and item tweak configurations whenever the horizontal menu was expanded. 
• Fixed an error that would prevent the tutorial text from fitting inside their respective window. 
• Taskbar menu will expand to fit the text of each button. 
• Fixed Quick Palette item slot to be that of the regular library item slot. 
• Reduced the size of collapse buttons, general buttons, exit buttons for multiple menus and others. 
• Reduced the vertical size of the taskbar. 
• Reduced the size of the icons in the item editing menu. 
• Fixed the text size of custom folders. 
• Fixed an error that would open the tweaks menu whenever an item spawn was cancelled by dragging it from the library to an area outside the grid bounds. 
• Fixed an error that wouldn’t refresh the Quick Palette whenever the map starts. 
• Fixed an error that would cause the “Collapse tweaks” button to require 2 clicks to activate the first time. 
• Fixed an error that would cause custom folders to open up without their respective indication icon in the “Folders” menu whenever an item is dragged into them. 
• Fixed an error introduced in the latest version that would prevent undo/redo commands from working in “Change time of day” actions. 
• Changed the position of “Add custom folder” and “Delete custom folder” buttons. 
• Increased the size of the “Folders” menu to fit all legacy folders in view by default. 
• Fixed an error that would cause tooltips to be unintentionally shown whenever an item is being dragged over other UI elements. 
• Fixed an error that would keep the “Item Tweaks” menu visible after said item was removed. 
• Fixed an error that would open the item editing menu whenever multiple instances of the same item are being spawned. 
• Fixed an error that would cause commands to trigger whenever the user was typing the name of a custom folder. 
• Fixed an error that would cause “Esc” key to reset folder selection. 
• Fixed an error that would cause “Esc” key to close the search menu. 
• Fixed an error that would cause problems whenever a group of assets is disbanded. 
• Fixed an error that would keep the search menu open when the user switches to the props menu. 
• Fixed an error that would keep the grids highlighted whenever a custom asset was saved. 
• Fixed an error that would prevent the library menu from refreshing after the search menu was closed. 
• Changed the visual feedback for item slots being pressed. 
• Item slots now have a consistent size across all the UI. 
• Fixed an error that would cause problems if an item is being dragged outside the library but later dropped on top of its own slot icon. 
• Updated the entire UI for the “Community” menu. 
• “Favorite” buttons and icons in the online menu has been removed. 
• Some graphics from the “Community” menu have been updated. 
• Fixed an error that would cause custom assets to unintentionally use internal names. 
• Fixed several texts not translated in the export menu. 
• Fixed glitch where clicking on object to spawn and then clicking the same object to stop spawning generated strange behavior. 
• Fixed error where Structural assets would appear in the prop section during the initial load. 
• Fixed custom group assets being generated correctly. 
• Pressing “Esc” while moving an asset will cause it to restore its original position, on top of cancelling the current selection.