Hello everyone!

Probably many have come across the fact that you have a huge library of tiles and terrain for 3D printing, but it is not always convenient for you to use them. To think about the plan of the dungeon, you need to either draw it on paper, and then divide it into tiles, calculate how many tiles you need to print. It all spends your time and turns preparation for the party, if not torment, then at least into a routine! We want to put an end to this! And our new program will help you with this.

How does our program work?

We have some very convenient options for drawing the dungeon.

First you need to create a foundation (do not be afraid that the walls look flat and ugly, this is just the “bone” of your dungeon):

The most interesting and difficult stage in the development process is the auto-generation of the dungeon. In fact, this is a procedurally generated space, we tried many ready-made solutions for this, but they all did not fit. It was difficult to make so that the length of the corridor was suitable, and the "room" really could be called a "room". We chose the graph theorem as the main way to solve this problem. Thus, several rooms of the same size as you indicated are generated in a pseudo-random manner on the field, after which all rooms are connected by all possible short cuts. Each room has 8 corridors or more, and after that the program removes everything except one. So we managed to create the most similar to real dungeons.

The first rule of the dungeon is that the dungeon always has walls.

However, we were still not happy with auto-generation.

Therefore, it was decided to make the function of hand drawing. But to which tile do you assign the brush to? The selection has become a floor tile. Thus, by clicking on the grid, you add one floor tile, and all the cells around it become walls, so we solved the first problem - the dungeon always has walls.

Further, we only increased the capabilities of the program. Initially, a “flat wall” tile could only be placed on a “flat wall” tile, and a “corner” tile could only be put in place for a “corner”. This rule greatly limited the creative component and therefore we added the "Free Brush" function.

Everything was fine, the program worked, but it still did not give tiles for 3D printing! And then we started working on export. We decided that there was no need to repeat the same tiles for printing many times. Instead, the export creates a folder on your computer where it sends all the tiles (.STL) used in the project in one instance. And it also creates an instruction how many times it is necessary to print each tile, this will make it easier to conduct calculations when printing. However, perhaps we will do some modification in the future.

In our dreams, to make it so that users can share their projects with each other. To do this, we implemented a storage system in a special format .dngnproj

You can share your work with the community!

We are already halfway to ensure that our program can work with any tiles that are on MyMiniFactory. In this way, we hope that users and artists will receive a new tool that will help make the hobby even more convenient.

You have no idea what we were faced with when we started implementing the function of adding custom tiles and tiles from other manufacturers ... so anarchy began in the dungeons...

To be continued!

P.S. I hope my English did not cause you bleeding from the eyes😀