Editor V2 Has Arrived

Hey everyone. It’s been a while since the last post, but there’s been a lot of work happening behind the scenes.

I usually try to keep these posts short. This time I can’t really do that, so sorry in advance — there’s a lot to say.

Why I Started Over

Today I’m introducing Editor V2, a completely new MapToPlay editor that I built from scratch. Of course, it stands on everything I learned from Editor V1, but starting again was very intentional.

I’ll be honest: when I started building the first editor, I was trying to prove that the whole idea could work. I cut corners everywhere. Some of them I cut deliberately so I could move faster, and some of them I cut simply because I didn’t know better yet. Even then, I knew I would eventually have to come back and rebuild those parts properly.

Editor V1 tried to tame a very complicated job with a fairly simple approach: one enormous heightmap, one enormous imagery layer on top, and a lower working resolution to stop everything from becoming too heavy. It worked well enough to prove the concept, but a lot of things were simplified along the way — sometimes intentionally, sometimes by mistake.

Time To Uncut Some Corners

Before I could keep moving forward, I needed to go back and uncut those corners. Yes, that is now an official technical term.

Editor V2 isn’t just a new look. The foundation underneath it has been rebuilt. It uses a new tiling system, works with data at its native resolution, and is designed for several people to work on the same project together.

There were also plenty of things that never felt quite right to me. Textures weren’t behaving the way I wanted. Raster layers were awkward. Foliage and trees rarely looked the way I imagined they should. I could have kept patching each problem separately, but at some point a clean rebuild became the more honest answer.

Collaboration, Finally

And yes, collaboration is finally here. You can invite people to a project, assign roles and permissions, see who else is in the editor, and watch updates appear while you work.

This was one of the main reasons for rebuilding the foundation. I didn’t want collaboration to be something awkwardly attached later. I wanted the editor to be ready for shared projects from the beginning.

Roads Can Look Like Your Roads

I’ve also added customizable road collections. You can now use your own textures and decals instead of being locked into one predefined look.

It sounds like a smaller feature next to a complete editor rebuild, but it makes a huge difference when you are trying to give a map its own character.

See Editor V2 In Action

Here is a first look at the new editor and some of the things it can already do.

It Is Here. It Is Also Not Finished.

Editor V2 is here. It is cleaner, faster, much better looking, and ready for collaboration. It is also, of course, bugged. Consider that my little launch gift.

I’m not going to pretend that everything is perfectly perfect now. It will take time to collect feedback, find the strange edge cases, fix the bugs, and polish the experience. That process probably never really ends, and honestly, that’s fine.

From now on, every new MapToPlay project will use Editor V2. This is the new foundation, and I’m excited to finally start building forward on top of it.

Thank you for sticking with MapToPlay — especially if you used Editor V1 and patiently worked around its weirder parts. I hope Editor V2 feels like the step forward it was meant to be.

Stan, Developer of MapToPlay