Hey everyone!
Hope you are doing well. I’ve been recovering from a COVID booster, but it’s my birthday this week, so things are good all things considered. Plus, I added multilayer support to Battle Map Studio! Also, I fixed so many issues that have come largely as a result of adding in layers. Seems like every time I’m about to press publish on this post another bug pops up!

Layer Updates

Woohoo, you can now make multistory buildings, caves, and layers of props!

After laying the groundwork for vertical position calculation in the previous updates, I was happy to finally be able to start working with multiple layers.

In this update, I created a couple of new windows: one for managing layers and another for editing a selected layer.



The Layers window displays an environment’s layers. To add a new layer, select the plus button.



Click on a layer to set it as the active layer. Map editing is constrained to the active layer, so no need to worry about accidentally painting on any layer that isn’t active.



Hit the edit button on any layer to open the Layer Properties window. Here you can set the layer name as well as the elevation options. These elevation options were previously in the Terrain Options window, but since the base layer is a layer too, it made sense to move them to the layer properties window.



Click on the transform gizmo toggle to enable the draggable positioner gizmo, and drag the gizmo to move the active layer up and down. You can also duplicate a layer by holding Alt while dragging the layer transform gizmo.



When you right-click a layer, options for editing, deleting, and duplicating the layer now appear in the pop-up window. Note that the base layer cannot be deleted!



While hovering on a layer, select the checkbox to change the layer visibility. When the layer is invisible, all blocks, plants, props, characters, and other components on that layer become invisible. Note that an invisible layer can still be edited, but you won’t be able to see the changes without setting the layer visible!

Future Work on Layers

As you can imagine, being able to add additional layers on the same or different vertical plane unlocks various map possibilities. Not only can you now create multistory maps, but you can also use layers to partition maps to improve performance, augment storytelling, or layer props on surfaces.



I plan to continue refining layer management and adding convenient functions to improve layer editing efficiency and simplicity. I’d love to hear what you think about layers, so come join the Discord, and let’s chat! I want to make layers simple and easy to work with.

Here are some other updates:

• Increased maximum range of the zoom speed setting.
  
• Added camera option to increase camera pitch angle.
  
• Added tooltips to non-obvious attributes on the character panel.
  

Fixes

• Fixed an input bug where some buttons would stay highlighted after selecting and moving away from them.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where the selector circle would not respect the active layer vertical position.
  
• Fixed a Tilt Five input bug where dragging a slider would offset the slider handle incorrectly.
  
• Fixed a few Tilt Five input issues related to the calculation of pointer position and cursor size.
  
• Fixed an input bug where the dragger tool would not respect the active layer position.
  
• Fixed a bug with liquid mesh generation where the height of the liquid was not calculated correctly, making the water start from zero, even if the layer was non-zero.
  
• Fixed a bug where copying and pasting a selection of units and blocks, the units would be spawned before blocks, causing the system to spawn a new block without the attributes of the pasted block.
  
• Fixed a bug where deleting a component using the block context panel would not refresh the panel UI, resulting in the deleted component being displayed.
  
• Fixed a bug where the selector object would not update with layer position changes.
  
• Fixed an input bug where hitting Tab would not change the brush selector's style group.
  
• Fixed a bug where the category buttons were not interactable.
  
• Fixed a bug with the movement and attack arrows where the vertical position was not calculated correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug where creating a new map or switching grid coordinates between hex and square would disrupt liquid mesh generation.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where slider inputs would not refresh their displayed input field value correctly until changed.
  
• Fixed a bug where undoing an action to update a unit would not always remove the unit from view.
  
• Fixed a bug with quick-walls where calculating the intersection of a room could cause an infinite loop.
  
• Fixed a bug where changing the style of the auto-wall set would not update the selected variation group correctly, causing the displayed wall style to be inconsistent with the chosen wall style.
  
• Fixed a bug where undoing and redoing actions would not maintain the order of actions, resulting in adding and removing units at a target position being occasionally out of sync when undoing/redoing.
  
• Fixed a bug with position data deserialization where a component of the grid position would fall back to an incorrect value if not initialized.
  
• Fixed a collider scale issue with a square block.
  
• Fixed a bug where selecting a character or prop would not always set the selected block context to that character or prop.
  
• Fixed an input bug where selectable objects were not always ordered based on distance.
  
• Fixed an input bug where the raycast layers on colliders were not always initialized correctly, resulting in colliders being unable to be selected.
  
• Fixed a bug where brush selectors would be duplicated if the asset had not been initialized.
  

I hope you find layers useful, and please let me know if you have any feedback!

-Bradley