FA Nexus v0.6 - Rebuilt Building Tool, Scene Groups, Prefabs & more (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

v0.6 is here with three headlines: a completely rebuilt Building Tool, Scene Groups & Prefabs (Experimental) - every Nexus layer can now be moved, rotated and scaled with Foundry's own tools. Buildings, Paths, Scatter, Textures and flattened sections take everything that belongs to them along and keep working afterwards.

On top of that, v0.6 brings Folders in the Layer Manager, improved architecture & better module settings, Flatten & Forge VTT improvements, and a long list of fixes and polish.

Rebuilt Building Tool (Pro)

The Building Tool has been rebuilt from the ground up.

• Workspaces: Tool Options are now organized into Outer Walls, Inner Walls, Portals, Fill Textures and Edit Geometry.

• Outer shapes: switch on Staged placement (Shift+E) to hold a new shape and move, resize, rotate or point-edit it before you accept it. With the new Room Construction switch, a shape you add onto the Building keeps a wall along its edge, so it becomes a room of its own instead of merging into the old one; Inner Only adds rooms inside the outline without enlarging it.

• Inner Walls and Fill Dividers: poly-lines or smooth splines that can be split, joined, and turned from straight to curved and back. Sticky Joints keep connected walls together while you reshape one.

• Fill per room: every enclosed room can have its own texture, scale, rotation, offset, opacity and color, or follow the Building's Fill.

• Portals: new Seamless Secret Doors look like the wall they are cut from. Placment has a live preview. Any Door, Window or Opening can now be converted to another kind, fitted to its artwork's width, and given its own behavior, sound, timing and initial state.

• Wall behavior: Solid, Terrain, Invisible and Ethereal presets (or your own combination) for the whole Building, one wall path, or single segments.

• Edit Geometry is the new name of Edit Shapes: it moves the vertices and curve handles of the committed shape.

Buildings made with v0.5.3 open in the new editor and stay untouched until you commit a change, which upgrades them.

Move, rotate and scale every Nexus layer

In 0.5.3 Foundry's rotate and resize handles were hidden for Buildings, Paths, Scatter and masked flattened sections, and moving a Building moved only its Tile. Now every Nexus layer works with Foundry's own Tile tools and inside Scene Groups. Nexus Edit keeps working afterwards: reopen a moved, rotated or scaled Building, Path, Texture or Scatter and carry on editing it.

• Buildings take their Fill, door and window frames, Inner Walls, Foundry Walls and Region along, also Buildings made in 0.5.3. They snap by their walls and turn about the nearest grid point, so a quarter turn keeps the walls on grid lines.

• Paths take their texture, shadows and Foundry Walls along.

• Scatter keeps its instances, shadows and color adjustments.

• Textures: resizing a masked Texture now scales its texture with the Tile.

• Flattened sections move, rotate and scale as one, with the Walls, doors and Regions they keep, masks included, and can still be deconstructed afterwards.

Scene Groups

Group Tiles, Walls, Lights, Sounds and Regions together in the new Scene Groups window, then move, rotate and scale them as one directly on the canvas, with a live preview, snapping, an adjustable pivot and a single Undo step per change.

• Groups can be renamed, nested, collapsed, hidden, locked, ungrouped or deleted, and every member still works as a normal Foundry object.

• In the Layer Manager, choose whether a click selects the single layer, its group, or its top-level group.

• Copy, paste and Duplicate stage the copy for placement, also across Levels and Scenes.

• Don't need them? Switch off "Enable Scene Groups" in the world settings (this switches Prefabs off too).

Prefabs (Experimental/WIP)

Save one or more Scene Groups as a Prefab, by dragging them into the new Prefabs tab or with "Save as Prefab…" in the group's menu, then place them in any Scene and on any Level.

• The Prefab library is local and shared by every world of your installation.

• Buildings, Paths, Textures and Scatter inside a placed Prefab stay editable with Nexus Edit.

• Placement is staged: move, resize, rotate and mirror before you accept, with grid snapping and a choice between the Prefab's own pixel size and the Scene's grid. Accept is one Undo step;

• Prefabs also work in Scenes with another grid size. "Prepare required assets" fetches the artwork a Prefab needs before you place it.

• Export Prefab and Import Prefab let you share them as files.

Prefabs are experimental, so how they are saved and placed may still change. You can switch them off with "Enable Prefabs (Experimental)" in the world settings.

I'm expecting both Scene Groups and Prefabs to evolve, especially on the UI/UX side, so please keep the feedback coming.

Layer Manager Folders

When might want to group some layers together without them creating a new 'depth' layer.

Organize dense Tile stacks into Folders inside an elevation group without changing anyone's Elevation. Folders can be nested, hidden, locked, flattened, or promoted to their own elevation, and the previews of active editor sessions can be dropped into them before commit.

The Forge VTT

FA Nexus works on The Forge, and this update fixes several Forge problems:

• The Path, Texture and Building editors now follow the Tool Options you see (Snap to Grid, snap density, F1 Help, shadows and more).

• Flatten no longer stops with "Unable to check existing outputs" on Forge EU servers.

• The Prefab library, Import Prefab and saving Prefabs with flattened artwork work with Forge's Assets Library.

• A quick second edit of a Building, Path or flattened section while the last one is still saving is now refused with a message, instead of leaving the Building broken for a while.

That said, mapmaking on The Forge is slow: every asset Nexus places, and every Flatten picture, mask and Prefab it makes, has to be uploaded to your Forge Assets Library, which is not built for speed at that quantity of files being created/uploaded. We recommend building maps in a local Foundry installation and moving the finished maps/scenes to The Forge.

Additional Improvements/changes

• Path wall behavior: Paths with "Foundry Walls" can choose what those Walls block (Solid, Terrain, Invisible, Ethereal). An Invisible fence or railing blocks movement and lets sight, light and sound through.

• Deleting a Building or Path asks once and removes its generated parts with it; one Ctrl+Z brings it all back.

• "New layers appear on": a new world setting lets new Assets, Scatter, Textures, Paths and Buildings belong only to the Level they're placed on, instead of every Level.

• Tokens and Mapmaking can be switched off separately in the world settings, for token-only or mapmaking-only setups.

• Changes to Foundry behaviour: a new settings section lists what Nexus changes in Foundry beyond its own layers, each with its own switch (including the new "Cross-Level Door Proxies"), in case it gets in the way of a system, another module or behaves in a unexpected breaking way.

• Token vision is back to Foundry's own: the Nexus Token Eye Level override is gone.

Fixes (notable)

v0.6.2 also includes a big pile of fixes. A few key ones:

• Switching Levels works again on Foundry 14.370 (Nexus kept you on the Level already in view).

• Placing a Tiny or Small creature as a one-square token no longer turns the Actor into a Medium creature.

• A Path dragged with Foundry's Tiles tool now takes its Walls along, and Path Walls now stay on their Level, so a fence on one floor no longer blocks the floors above and below.

• Nexus Edit on an existing layer no longer changes the settings for the next new one.

• Off-screen custom artwork is no longer drawn, and painted masks use much less GPU memory.

Feedback

v0.6.2 is our biggest update yet. Under the hood, most of FA Nexus has been reorganized and much of it rewritten, and the Building Tool is brand new code, so please keep in mind that FA Nexus is still in Beta! We are constantly iterating and improving the features and bringing in new ones, all based on your feedback.

As usual, please let us know here, on Discord, or preferably through GitHub Issues (https://github.com/Forgotten-Adventures/FA-Nexus/issues) if anything behaves oddly or you have workflow, improvement or feature requests.

There are many more changes in this update than highlighted in this post. The full, more detailed changelog can be found here:

https://github.com/Forgotten-Adventures/FA-Nexus/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Hope y'all enjoy the new update and have some fun with mapmaking!

You can update the module through Foundry directly, or install it if you don't have it yet: just search for "FA Nexus" in the module directory. FA Nexus v0.6.2 needs Foundry v14.