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Niemand

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I've been tinkering a bit with the code to the 3D Editor, and I was wondering, does anyone else ever really make much use of the fill rectangle and fill hollow rectangle functions? I realized that I don't, so in my own copy of the editor I've overwritten them with rectangle copy and paste functions, which I know are something that a lot of people have wanted.

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In that case, I think that I may need to undertake the slightly more ambitious project of reshuffling the existing buttons and finding room for some new ones. As it is some of the arrangement has gotten a bit mixed up anyway (the zoom/realistic view button and the 2D-3D button really ought to be togetherand so on), and I think I may have thought of a way to fit in space for six more buttons now that I look at it. That would give us a bit of room to grow into.

*i's eyedropper tool should be quite easy to implement, and that would then leave ~4 free button spaces. Any other ideas for things we could really use?

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My Christmas Wish List of Improvements

What we really need is a 3D editor that can be easily compiled on common IDEs like Dev-C++.

 

If the Editor could be re – written to provide for a rectangular application of the Blocked property, you would not need blocked varieties of floor. Currently floor and terrain types can be applied by hollow or full rectangles, something like that is needed for the Blocked property. This would be in addition to the existing tool, #32.

This function could be extended to placed objects too.

 

All these problems are found in both versions of the Windows Editor:

 

Needs a whole lot more (Shift + letter) hot keys. If you have the Caps Lock on, you can select functions with the keyboard while using the mouse with your right hand.

 

Could support the functions fl_ed_icon_adjust and te_ed_icon_adjust. I suspect they are meant to show the icon adjustment in the 2-D display.

 

The commands in the Edit menu are not explained in the Editor Help menu. Lines 886… of the file “Bl A Editor.c” suggest that the commands involve copying and pasting of creatures, items and terrain scripts.

 

Creature default script is not implemented in the editor. (It is not automatically assigned to creatures having that script.)

 

When you try to place special encounter nodes, it suggests states like 0,1,2 which are already defined elsewhere.

 

The automatic terrain placement zones, (the terrain sequences 11 thru 22, 25 thru 36, 45 thru 56 and 59 thru 70) need better handling. It might be handy if you can totally customize whether and where they occur.

 

Floor terrains will be “signs” if they have the same number as a terrain type that is a sign. If, for example, terrain type 194 is a sign then floor type 194 will be a sign too. As the supply of custom graphics increases, so will the number of scenarios with 200+ floor types. Changing which terrain types are signs will cause a corresponding change in the floor types.

 

Terrain shortcut keys can only be given to individual types of terrain, not to whole sequences as is the case for floors.

 

There is a funny “OK” in the Set Variable Town Entry page. It occurs on the fourth line. This is a problem in the 3D Editor only.

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I would find it very nice if a special rectangle, upon placing it, will start with number 10, and not 0.

 

I don't know if this is really manageble, but I would find it veyr handy if I could define, in the editor tiself, where the locations are of all those small apps (like the dialogue editor and the graphics adjusterand alint), so i can click a button that will open them. That's instead of navigating the whole way to my hard disk to finaly find the program.

 

The eyedropper sounds like a magnificent idea.

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I would like the ability to somehow set what scripts terrain scripts start out with, instead of it always just being dummy, and be able to define what value was in each memory cell.

 

And along the same line, it would be nice to have the same thing for creatures. So for example, you'd select "Set custom creature Script" Select abilnpc, memory cell 1 to 1; and memory cell 4 to 5. Then every creature you placed would run script abilnpc with those memory cells already set. You wouldn't have to be constantly opening up creatures' scripts and setting memory cells.

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So here are the revamped button arrangements as I've though of them so far.

 

Quote:
Originally written by Ishad Nha

a rectangular application of the Blocked property, you would not need blocked varieties of floor. Currently floor and terrain types can be applied by hollow or full rectangles, something like that is needed for the Blocked property.

There is a limit to how many blocked spaces can be placed using that tool. If you need a lot of blocked spaces, you really should use a blocked floor.

Quote:
Could support the functions fl_ed_icon_adjust and te_ed_icon_adjust. I suspect they are meant to show the icon adjustment in the 2-D display.
To the best of my knowledge there re no fl_ed_icon_adjust and te_ed_icon_adjust attributes. I am however, trying to figure out how to make the editor correctly display icon adjusts in 2D mode.

Quote:
Creature default script is not implemented in the editor. (It is not automatically assigned to creatures having that script.)
This isn't something the editor handles. Leaving a creature set to use its default script means that when you play the game it will use whatever default script is set for it in [scenario]data.txt. The editor just doesn't bother to check and display which script this is.

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Floor terrains will be “signs” if they have the same number as a terrain type that is a sign.
A floor cannot be a sign. Besides, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between floors and terrains; there can be 512 terrains but only 256 floors.

 

Quote:
Originally written by Spent Salmon

An "open script" button. Not sure how easy it would be to implement, but it would make life much easier in so many ways. It should just open whatever script(s) are associated with a given floor/terrain/creature, and ignore blue rectangles.

I have had something a bit like this in mind; my idea was to make a system a bit like Javadoc or similar where the writer of a script places specially formatted comments at the beginning of the file, and the editor would read these so that in the 'Edit This Creature' dialog it could display a snippet about what the script does and what each memory cell is for. This would be a lot of work to make though, so I won't be attempting it just yet.

 

Lastly, I want to point out that I can only recompile and readily alter the Mac Editor. I will keep track of what I do though so that the same can be done with the Windows Editor.

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Quote:
Originally written by Niemand:
To the best of my knowledge there re no fl_ed_icon_adjust and te_ed_icon_adjust attributes. I am however, trying to figure out how to make the editor correctly display icon adjusts in 2D mode.
There are, although — odd — it appears that they're not documented. I swear that they were at one point. Amazingly enough, they display properly on the automap in the game, as you can see in Exodus anywhere there's vahnatai floor. They just don't display in the editor.

Quote:
The editor just doesn't bother to check and display which script this is.
Come to think of it, it would be nice if the editor did bother to display this, although it's not critical.

One other thing: on pretty much all the dialog boxes that pop up in the editor, the text cursor starts at the beginning of the line, and it would be more convenient if it started at the end (to ease deleting whatever the default thing is). It would be even more convenient if the text started highlighted, like a normal box, but eh.

Lazarus reminded me: as a possible alternative, simply being able to cut and paste creature scripts would be nice.
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I would want the following:

 

Eyedropper: selects current floor/terrain in Editor

 

Duplicate creature: Click on a creature, it stores all of the information. Clicking on an empty space places an exact copy. Ideally, this would last until you click on a different creature or hit a different button in the menu.

 

I'm sure I'll think of more later.

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I haven't used the editor in about six months now, so yeah, you are correct. The suggestion about being able to transfer the script would be a good one.

 

I've eluded to this elsewhere, but if I could have anything I wanted, more advanced features would do the following:

 

1) Have a basic, simple text editor to facilitate a more integrated scenario design tool.

2) Can read in a dialouge script and gives you options similar to the Dialogue Editor. Could the two codes somehow be merged?

2a) Dialogue nodes structured in terms of nodes like in Blades of Exile. The user clicks on the node, text windows and options come up.

3) Bring up a town/outdoor script and see the states on command. Ideal would be to be able to use point and click nodes, to create simple scripts, but just being able to bring the script up in simple text editor would be nice.

4) The ability to create a skeleton script for a new town/outdoor section. This way I don't have to duplicate a file in another text editor.

5) Parsing of the scenario script for easy editing of shops, boats, etc.

 

I know most of these are pipe dreams, but if I had a miracle wand for this, that is what I would make.

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So I have the eyedropper and paint-bucket tools working now. Next I need to put into action my plan to fit in more buttons. One question: what kind of icon for the copy and paste buttons would make sense?

 

Lastly, I agree with *i and others who have said similar things that an IDE type program would be a big improvement over the system we have now. I've been thinking a bit about this, and I think I might be able to make a good attempt at such a thing, but not right now. One problem is that The 3D Editor is Carbon-C++, Dialogue Editor is pure Java, Alint is Cocoa-C++ (if I remember right), Graphic Adjuster is Carbon-C, and so on. They would basically all have to be recreated in a single application, particularly since Carbon is. . . not so good. Maybe next summer when I have some more time I'll give it a try. For now, I just want to patch up the existing 3D editor to max-out its potential.

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New idea: How about if when you select "Load Different Town" or "Load Different Outdoor Section" it actually brought up a menu with a list of every town/outdor number followed by its name? Town numbers are easy enough to remember on small projects, but outdoors are hard to keep track of without a list, and when opening up other people's scenarios its a pain to find stuff.

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The computer is always right.

If you have a type 215 terrain that is a sign the Editor will always treat type 215 floors as being signs! It will go through the whole rigmarole of asking for the text of the sign&&. Of course the party won't be able to use the "sign" in the game.

 

Simplest solution is to make all real signs have terrain numbers greater than 255, but that will require a bit of changing of terrain.

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Quote:
f you have a type 215 terrain that is a sign the Editor will always treat type 215 floors as being signs! It will go through the whole rigmarole of asking for the text of the sign&&. Of course the party won't be able to use the "sign" in the game.
Oh, you mean this is a bug that should be removed, not a feature you want added! My apologies. I think I can fix it.
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Possibly the best approach is to alter the code so that it can be compiled on any common compiler. Then give people tips about how to write their own favorite features into it. Thus everyone can test their favorite ideas here and now, and see how useful they are in practice.

 

As for the Edit menu, it is the only menu not mentioned in the BoA Editor Docs. I had to go into the source file “Bl A Editor.c”, lines 871 thru 900, to figure out what it does. My guess is based upon lines like this:

“if ((copied_creature.exists() == FALSE) && (copied_item.exists() == FALSE) && (copied_ter_script.exists == FALSE)) {”

 

Authors sometimes want two or more versions of the same town in a given scenario, the quickest way to achieve this is to import the earlier version into the slot reserved for the latter. So if town 1 and town 9 are the same town before and after a given event, import the town 1 into the place reserved for town 9.

 

Currently in importing a town, everything is imported in one go. Would there be any use for the individual importing of each feature: special nodes, scripts, floors, heights, terrain and monsters? Ditto, outdoor sections are imported in one hit too.

 

In the MS-Dos Edit command, here and now some things can be pasted individually: floors and heights for instance. The beginning and the end are usually easy to spot for each section. You won’t even need to manually adjust the end of each line. (What I am referring to here is: if the floor for town 1 starts at column 11 on some line and the floor for town 9 starts at column 23 on some other line, you can’t immediately paste the latter into the former. One trick is to use the Save As command to create a (wholly expendable) second bas file, then delete the first twelve characters from the floor listing for town 1. Save the bas file then close it. If you then re – open it, the floor for town 9 should start at the desired column 11. You can then paste town 9 floor from the expendable second bas file into the listing for town 1 in the original file. In the Edit command deleting 12 characters won’t have any immediate effect on the next line, it won’t cause every following character to move up 12 spaces.)

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  • 3 weeks later...

(Bump)

So I now have the copy and paste functions working, including the choices to paste any combination of the copied rectangle's floors, terrains, and heights. (That is, you can paste just the floor, or just the terrains and heights, etc.) i've also fixed the bug where the editor would try to treat some floors as signs.

 

I'm also making good progress on a feature that I had hoped to add, but hadn't wanted to get people's hopes up about in case I couldn't do it. It appears I can do it, and that feature is: unlimited undo and redo for drawing operations! So far it works with the pencil, paintbrush, paint-bucket, spray-can and rectangle drawing tools, and before long it should work with all of the others and heights as well. No more having to reopen the .bas file to get rid of a change you didn't want to make!

 

Also, once I'm back at school in another week or so I can begin work on updating the windows version as well.

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By Laz:

Quote:
You're my hero.
Second that motion. By the by, is there a simple way to disable sounds in the editor? There's been a number of requests for that.

 

--------------------

I am not a chauvinist, obviously... I believe in women's rights for every woman but my own.

- Harold Washington

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Quote:
Originally written by Niemand:
(I'm also making good progress on a feature that I had hoped to add, but hadn't wanted to get people's hopes up about in case I couldn't do it. It appears I can do it, and that feature is: unlimited undo and redo for drawing operations! So far it works with the pencil, paintbrush, paint-bucket, spray-can and rectangle drawing tools, and before long it should work with all of the others and heights as well. No more having to reopen the .bas file to get rid of a change you didn't want to make!
What a terrific idea. That's exactly what i wanted to be in the editor all along!
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Way ahead of you *i. I've got a menu item that toggles the sounds on and off, and stores the setting in the preferences. I've also fixed it so that the cursor starts out at the end of the text field in dialogs, and the script a placed creature will use is shown, even if it's the default script for that creature type.

Right now I'm trying to make the 'load different town' and 'load different outdoor section' dialogs allow the user to select the zone from a list showing the towns' or sections' names. After that I want to try to get graphic adjusts working in all viewing modes, and try to make the scroll bar on the right side respond to scroll wheel input.

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Fear not! I'm aiming to begin a Mac beta test later this week.

As features go, I realized just how much I could do with a list of zone names. As a result, I've torn apart and rebuilt the import system so that now the user can see a list of the names of zones in the source scenario to alleviate having to guess numbers blindly. Also, importing a town now prompts for a file, then a town number, rather than the other way around. I think that I've been able to relax the restriction on importing a town only over one of the same size, but I will need the help of testers to determine if I really got it right.

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Apologies for this being a double post, but I wanted to make it clear that there's something new here:

 

I believe that the time has come to beta test the new Mac version of the editor, so i could use a few volunteers. Names and email addresses would be logical, and knowing which OS version you plan to test it under would be nice.

 

Lastly, the final feature I've worked on is fixing icon adjusts in 2D mode. It turns out that the editor already did use te/fl_ed_icon_adjust, just hardly anyone was bothering to use these properties. So, what the editor now does is if a floor or terrain has no ed_icon_adjust but does have an ordinary icon_adjust, the ordinary adjust is shown in 2D mode. This fixed the appearance of blue carpet, for instance. Also, items and creatures are now adjusted when displayed in 2D mode.

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Quote:
Originally written by Niemand:
So, what the editor now does is if a floor or terrain has no ed_icon_adjust but does have an ordinary icon_adjust, the ordinary adjust is shown in 2D mode. This fixed the appearance of blue carpet, for instance. Also, items and creatures are now adjusted when displayed in 2D mode.
This seems like a bad idea. I want the editor to reflect the game as closely as possible, and using normal icon_adjust doesn't affect the 2D automap.

If corescendata doesn't use ed_icon_adjust, that's a bug in corescendata, not a bug in the editor.
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Ok, compromise: I'll give you a toggle-able option to turn off the additional adjusting behavior. You can turn it off and leave it off, and I will turn it on and leave it on, because I can't stand not being able to tell what I'm seeing in 2D mode. I'm assuming that, though it was included in the quote, adjusting the graphics of creatures and items in 2D mode is not being called a bad idea.

And it will take some will power not to name the new menu item "Kelandon's 2D Icon Adjust Toggle".

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Quote:
Originally written by Niemand:
Ok, compromise: I'll give you a toggle-able option to turn off the additional adjusting behavior. You can turn it off and leave it off, and I will turn it on and leave it on, because I can't stand not being able to tell what I'm seeing in 2D mode.
Why don't you just make the editor display ed_icon_adjust properly? That would mean that you could tell what you were seeing in 2D mode, and you could also reflect the game accurately.

Quote:
I'm assuming that, though it was included in the quote, adjusting the graphics of creatures and items in 2D mode is not being called a bad idea.
Right. My mistake.

Quote:
And it will take some will power not to name the new menu item "Kelandon's 2D Icon Adjust Toggle".
Call it that! I want to be in the 3D editor! It will ensure my infamy forever! cool
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Quote:
Why don't you just make the editor display ed_icon_adjust properly? That would mean that you could tell what you were seeing in 2D mode, and you could also reflect the game accurately.
Like I said before, it does already! However, a quick search of my BoA folder locates only 16 terrains and 1 floor which were defined using ed_icon_adjust (in the basic game files and 25 scenarios). So, it's convenient to be able to view terrains and floors with their simplistic adjusts instead of having to rewrite all of their definitions.

Quote:
Call it that! I want to be in the 3D editor! It will ensure my infamy forever!
I did. :p (I called it Kelandon's Strict 2D Icon Adjusts, to be precise). And if anyone asks, you made me do it!
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Quote:
Originally written by Niemand:
Quote:
Why don't you just make the editor display ed_icon_adjust properly? That would mean that you could tell what you were seeing in 2D mode, and you could also reflect the game accurately.
Like I said before, it does already!
No... it doesn't. I'm using the Mac version of the 3D Editor v1.02 b6, the current version on Sourceforge, and (for example) the vahnatai floor (floor 100) in Exodus has a fl_ed_icon_adjust on it that does not display in the editor in 2D mode but does display on the automap in the game.
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i can only conclude that the newest availible source code is newer than the newest availible build, because it works in every version I have on my computer, all of which are derived from the code at Sourceforge. Point is, in the version I've got, it works. I will happily send you a copy so that you can try it for yourself.

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Porting

 

The 3D Editor crashes disastrously every time you attempt to port any BoE scenario.

 

While the official Spiderweb editor should port properly, within the limits of its porting algorithm. The actual process used suffers all sorts of flaws and glitches. For instance, you can't customize the translation tables for items, terrain and monsters unless you hex - edit.

 

Porting is easy enough, I tried both Valley of Dying Things and Inn of Blades, both were ported properly. Newly ported scenarios will be found in the Data folder not the BoA Scenarios folder, after all they are not ready for immediate play anyway. The folders will have names like bladeinn.bas or VALLEYDY.BAS.

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New Request: This goes hand in hand (at least in my mind laugh ) with the idea of having creature's scripts not just read "default" but rather their real script. I was thinking it would be nice to have a "Reload Default Creature Scripts" option. Basically the problem is that I'll place a bunch of custom monsters with no custom script (And thus Basicnpc as the default) then later alter the data when I decide I need a custom script for that creature. Unfortunately the editor still remembers when Basicnpc was the default, so I have to either write all the scripts in by hand or replace all the monsters. This new option would recheck what every creature's new default is, and set their current script appropriately.

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