Non-destructive landscape modifications using edit layers - seamlessly blend dungeon layouts with existing terrain and paint material layers based on distance from dungeon boundaries

Canvas Theme

Canvas Minimap's LayoutDrawPercent parameter has been moved from the component to the Canvas Minimap Theme assets, since this is art specific configuration and doesn't need to be set everytime in the actors

Bug Fixes

• Grid Builder's Pattern matcher was not working correctly when the dungeon was not in the origin. This also fixes the cropping issues at the edge of the grid builder dungeons
• Recompiled all the sample theme files to upgrade them to the lastest version. If you have an older theme file from a year ago, open it atleast once in the theme editor and resave to upgrade.
  

A complete networked dungeon sample is now available in the Launch Pad, featuring server browser, lobby system, and late-join support.

The Build System coordinates dungeon generation across server and clients - handling login, instructing clients to build locally, waiting for completion (while players remain in spectator mode), then spawning everyone as pawns.

Session management, lobby, and server browser code are provided as reference implementations to adapt for your own game.

Build System Overhaul

• The build system handles most of the heavylifting of server and cilent sync and also works in single player mode. Documentation
• Two build modes: "wait for all clients" and "direct start"
• Removed ADungeonGameMode in favor of components - attach to your existing game mode instead

New Features

• Navigation Support in Theme Nodes - Theme mesh nodes now have a flag to affect navigation for both instanced and non-instanced actors/blueprints

• Dungeon Streaming - Spawn rooms are kept as always resident to avoid race conditions for late-spawning actors

Fixes

• Canvas no longer affects fog of war when using spectator pawn.
• HISM meshes now correctly include actors spawned by the Multi Mesh theme node

Breaking Changes

• ADungeonGameMode has been removed - use the build system components instead
• Add a DungeonCanvas component to your Dungeon actor if you want to use the minimap framework - it is no longer added by default

• New: GPU Voxel Engine - Generate infinite organic worlds (Caves, Floating Islands) using GPU compute shaders with full Nanite & Lumen support
• New: Interactive Theme Editor - Design themes directly in the Level Viewport using drag-and-drop workflows with real-time propagation
• New: Cell Flow Builder - New Voronoi-based layout generator for organic, non-grid dungeon structures with dynamic height support
• New: PCG Framework Integration - Use Flow Graphs to drive Unreal's PCG system (includes Electric Dreams integration samples)
• New: "Foundry" Theme - A production-ready Industrial Sci-Fi theme asset pack included for free
• New: Launch Pad Dashboard - Completely rewritten web-based dashboard for one-click access to samples and documentation
• New: Unreal Engine 5.7 Support
• New: Pattern Matcher improvements including new "Copy Markers" and "Rename Markers" nodes
• Fix: Optimized scene provider to limit active latent tasks, preventing GPU overloads during heavy generation

Quick Start

The Minimap framework called Dungeon Canvas has been rewritten to be more efficient and flexible. The documentation has been updated

Camera

The UI widget lets you choose a camera type, which allows you to focus on the player or NPC, have adaptive zoom based on the velocity or show the entire dungeon.

You may override the canvas theme on the widget. Leave it blank to have it pick up the default theme provided in the Dungeon Actor

Shared Canvas Resources

Multiple UI widgets can share the same Dungeon Canvas resources (like layout textures, SDF textures etc) and apply different material themes on it with varying draw settings (like fog of war, camera settings, theme settings etc). This reduces memory overhead and is faster as it requires less updates

Fog of War Rewrite

In the previous version, we were reading back the fog of war texture pixel states from the GPU back to the CPU for the pixels that the NPCs were on, and showing them when visible. This is no longer required as we have a better approach that is faster and more visually appealing

Expose as Material

Apply your minimap materials on any world object. Attach the DungeonCanvasMaterialThemeBaker component to any actor you'd like to use this on, choose a texture size and your desired draw settings (camera, fog of war settings etc). This will render the minimap with the supplied theme and make the final material available to you, which you can apply anywhere in the world

The Canvas Snap demo has two of these in the spawn room. They both have their draw settings customized

The demo character carries a 3D panel showing the map in realtime

Automated Dungeon Build System

Automateically build you dungeons at runtime by checking the Auto Build on Play flag in your Dungeon actor in the scene

This avoids lots of blueprint boiler plate and gets you up and running quickly. This works with all types of builders

Multiplayer support

Dungeons generated with this system fully support mulitplayer. To make it work correctly on mulitplayer, your game mode must derive from DungeonGameMode. Check the various canvas samples demos under DungeonArchitect Content > Samples/DA_Canvas_Demo/DA_Sample_Canvas_CellFlow_Grid.DA_Sample_Canvas_CellFlow_Grid

SGF Entrance / Exit Constraints

Tag the room connections in your modules as entrance or exit. These are great for puzzle games (e.g. portal) or for controlling the flow of your dungeon room layouts

Complete Changelog

• New: Dungeon Canvas Framework has been rewritten to be more powerful and flexible. It is faster, takes up less memory, support for different camera types, minimap materials that can be applied to the world, multiple widgets can share the same dungeon canvas resources with different themes and a lot more. This also paves the way for future PCG integration
• New: Updated documentation on Dungeon Canvas
• New: Automated Dungeon Build System to automatically build your dungeons at runtime (also works on multiplayer). Control this from the Dungeon actor's detail panel. This avoids a lot of boilerplate blueprint code
• New: SGF supports Entrance / Exit connection constraints
• New: Grid Dungeon Platform Volumes optionally clamp the Z value of the generated dungeons. These are great if you want to align the height of the platforms with existing level geometry
• New: Blueprint function GetAllDungeonSpawnedActors to fetch all the dungeon spawned actors in the scene
• Fix: SGF Door actor correctly orients itself to the direction of the flow graph link its on. This was inconsistent in the past and the door actor would orient itself in the opposite direction, in some cases.
• Fix: SGF Negation Volumes were not working correctly with the reverse flag
• Fix: SGF Create Path node was ignoring the Node Creation constraint
• Fix: Dungeon Canvas Room Shape Texture assets use SoftObject pointers to avoid cooking issues
• Fix: SGF ModuleDB compilation crashed the editor in some cases

Critical Fix: Flow Graph Samples Crash

Some of the older flow graph samples were crashing since they were not auto-upgraded correctly

Grid Flow Transform Logic marker transform

The grid flow transform logic provides you access to the marker's current transform. You can use this to adjust your transform. In the above example, we use it to cancel out (inverse) the rotation of the walls

Apply this blueprint on your snap connection theme graphs. These blueprints give you access to the two room category it connects to and are great for selecting special doors for certain rooms (like boss / treasure rooms)

This sample has a custom door for boss and treasure rooms (red and yellow doors)

The red and yellow doors have this blueprint attached to it, where we check if either of the two room it connects to has the "Boss" category

Check the sample here:

Procedural Fill SGF sample

Design only the main rooms in your SGF dungeons, and procedurally fill up empty space in between. This is done by creating a room that creates procedural goemetry (using another grid dungeon actor inside the room)

There are only four rooms that are custom designed here, the rest is filled up procedurally

Find the sample here:

Tutorial for setting this up is coming soon

Snap Module Streaming Events

Any actor in a snap module can receive chunk streaming events. These are great for initialization and cleanup, especially for procedural content (see Procedural SGF Fill sample below)

Open up an actor blueprint that you'd like to receive chunk streaming events and implement the interface . Now place this actor in a module to recieve the events. These are great for initialization and cleanup (e.g. building procedural nested dungeons, NPC spawners etc)

Snap Streaming Actor Serialization

Save the state of any actor inside a chunk module when it gets hidden or unloaded. Then automatically restore the state back when it loads back, or becomes visible.

If an actor inside a module implements the DungeonStreamingActorSerialization interface, then every variable whos SaveGame flag is set would be saved / restored when the chunk's visibitliy or load state changes

Move actors from Snap module level to Persistent Level

Use the blueprint node DARecreateActorInLevel to move/recreate actors from snap module level to the persistent level. If you have dynamic actors that are part of a snap module (e.g. a weapon that you can pick up or an NPC), it would disappear when the level streams out. Use this node to recreate the actor in the persistent level

Check the sample DungeonArchitect Content > Samples > DA_Game_DungeonDoom > Map_DungeonDoom

The spawn room contains two artifacts that can be picked up by the player and they get attached to the weapon.

Note that these two artifact blueprints were placed inside the spawn room module and are part of the spawn room level. They will get streamed out when the spawn room chunk unloads (e.g. when you move far away from the spawn room)

Approach and pick them up, and they get attached to your weapon. The red artifact gets directly attached to the weapon component. For the green one, we use a slightly different approach. Before attaching the green artifact, we recreate the green artifact actor in the persistent level and then attach it

When the spawn room streams out, the red artifact will stream out with it and will no longer be visible. However, the green artifact will stay on.

Before attaching the green artifact, we recreated it in the persistent world

SGF Module Selector Blueprints

Hook on to the build process of a SGF dungeon and filter out modules you don't want at a certain location. For example, we have two variations of rooms, one with pillars, and one without. We filter out the pillar version if there's no room below it

These are added in the dungeon actor's properites:

Check out the sample:

Node Coordinate input added to Module Category Selection

You can now use the node coordinates while deciding on the category of rooms to select at a certain node in your ModuleCategorySelection blueprints

For example, use the Z value of the coordinate to give a different look on each floor, or select a differnet room type on the edges of the dungeon

Find the sample here:

SnapMap Module Rotation Constraint

SnapMap Module Database items have a flag to allow / disallow module rotation while stitching them together. Previously this was a global flag in the config that affected every module globally. You get more control, similar to the SGF module database

The boss room is set to not rotate, which the other modules can rotate. You can find the sample here

Find the module database here:

Marker Emitter Blueprint Execution Stage

Marker emitter blueprints run before the pattern matcher, so anything you emit in your blueprint is available to the pattern matcher

Sometimes, you might add new markers from the pattern matcher and would like to have this available in the marker emitter blueprint. Previously this was not possible since the order was fixed, where the blueprint ran first, creating a list of new markers, and then passing them on to the pattern matcher for it to match and modify

Change the execution order of your marker emitter blueprints from the class settings

• Before Pattern Matcher: Execute before the pattern matcher. Markers emitted by this blueprint are available to the pattern matcher. However, the Patter Matcher emitted markers are not available to this blueprint, since they haven't executed yet
• After Pattern Matcher: Executes after the pattern matcher. Markers emitted using the Pattern Matcher are available to this blueprint. However, markers emitted from this blueprint will not be available to the pattern matcher

Bug Fixes / Misc

• Theme Engine crashed in some instances when nested markers were used on larger theme files
• Landscape Modifier class's properties are exposed to blueprint
• Grid Flow Query has a new node to return connected chunk node coords, to allow traversal across the flow graph

SnapMap Custom Module Bounds Shape

Define snap module bounds using custom shapes. This opens up lots of possibilities for snap map based dungeons. Previously the doors had to be aligned at the edges of the axis-aligned bounding box. Now you can place the doors at any orientation, at the edge of your custom polygon shape and create a more tightly packed and organic looking level

Drag drop custom shapes (like boxes, cylinders or polygon) in your module level file

You can combine snap based dungeons with Unreal Engine 5's PCG framework. Here, we use Dungeon Architect along with the PCG assets that come along with the free Electric Dreams project from Epic

Theme Editor: Multi-Mesh/Blueprint node

The new Multi-Mesh/BP node in the Theme Editor allows you to randomly choose a mesh from a list of meshes (or blueprints). Just drag drop the assets from the content browser on to the theme editor and it would create a single multi-mesh node.

This drastically reduces the required setup and the number of nodes in the theme editor

Flow Graph Branch Selection

Select different paths in your flow graph to add randomness to your game. In this example, our graph picks up one of the two possibilities:

• Create a treasure room guarded by a mini-boss room
• Create a locked treasure room, with the key somewhere in the main path

You can have more than two branches merge into this node and it would pick one up randomly

New Mini-Map Framework

The Mini Map framework has ben rewritten. All builders can write to a unified 2D minimap framework.

Snap based dungeons support 3D minimaps. You can use a simplified snap module for the minimap. The system stitches the minimap version of the modules.

The minimap can be spawned in the current game world (for a 3D HUD, or a hologram):

Alternatively, you can create the minimap dungeon in a separate world, outside the game world, and have it rendered to a RenderTexture to display on the HUD. When you spawn and render the minimap on a separate world, you don't have to use any hacks (like moving the minimap dungeon far away from the playable area os it doesn't occlude) and you can use a different lighting model

The grid flow minimap actor is removed and replaced with the generic DungeonMinimap2D actor. The gridflow game sample has been updated

Snap Connection Entrance and Exit Constraints

Get more control on the flow of your snap based dungeons using the new Entrance and Exit constraint. Setting a door constraint to Entrance would ensure that we do not exit the room from this door. These are great for puzzle games where the player needs to solve a puzzle and get access to the exit door.

You can use the Entrance / Exit constraint to create some advanced patterns. Here, we create a Hilbert Curve using Dungeon Architect's Graph Grammar production rules

Create those rules for A, B, C and D in the snap flow grammar editor:

Then expand the graph a few times and we get a level like this:

Expand the graph grammar a few more times (i.e. increase the iteration count in the exec graph) and we get a larger level

SGF City Sample

You can create many different types of levels with SnapMap and SGF builders. This sample shows you how to build a large drivable city

SnapMap Dungeon Rotation / Scaling

SnapMap dungeons inherit the Dungeon actor's transform. Move / Rotate / Scale the dungeon actor and regenerate the dungeon

Editor Improvements

• Spawn Logic function has access to the dungeon's Random Stream object. Use this for any randomness, so all clients generate the same dungeon everywhere
• Theme nodes's Transform rule, Selection rule and Spawn logic gets disabled if their corresponding enabled flag is unchecked
• Added procedural transform rules. These are built-in rules that are used frequently. Apply these to your nodes, without having to create them everytime. (Example: we have a jitter procedural transform node, select from the drop down and apply this if you want to remove z-fighting with overlapping meshes)
• Flow Editor's preview viewport's shadows were pitch black in 5.2+. Added a SkyLight to brighten the scene
• Reduced the download size of Dungeon Architect by half, by optimizing the sample assets
• Custom Dungeon Item Folder Name: The spawned dungeon actors are placed in a separate folder, usually with the name {DungeonActorName}_Items. You can override this with your own nameSelect the Dungeon actor and head over to the Advanced category and check the UseCustomItemFolderName flag and specify your custom folder name

Bug Fixes

• Drag drop assets from the content browser on to the theme editor was not working and has been fixed
• Fixed a bug in SGF link when connecting different paths together
• Theme editor's actor node was not setting the transform correctly
• Removed experimental tag from the fast cell distribution on the grid config. This was causing the settings to be disabled in the editor
• Some sample blueprints had compile errors and has been fixed
• Fixed a dungeon deletion bug where actors were destroyed while being traversed
• Fixed the SGraphNode hard reference warnings in debug mode
• Fixed a crash issue in the theme editor's procedural mesh
• Fixed compile errors on Linux