Lets hear about your editor mistakes

[Poit]

I'd like to hear about some of the awful mistakes people have made in the editor that caused them to loose lots of work. Most of my mistakes thus far have been relitively simple, mostly doing something manually and then finding out there is a button that could have saved hours of work. I'd like to hear about the frustrating experiences of others to put my small ones into perspective, so now's that chance to tell everyone about your BOA horror stories and moan to your hearts content.

[Kelandon]

I can't recall mistakes I've made that have cost me hours of work, but I can remember having to do things manually that now can be done almost instantly via utility. When BoA first came out and I wanted to make a scenario about sliths, I decided to use icon adjustment to make different-looking sliths. I had to place them in the 2D Editor, muck with their cr_icon_adjust values in the custom objects script, load up BoA, enter a scenario and look at them, change their cr_icon_adjust values, reload a saved game and re-enter the scenario, change their values again, reload again, etc.

 

Now with Graphic Adjuster and the 3D Editor, it takes me about fifteen seconds to do what it took me half an hour to do before, and I can do it better.

 

EDIT: Oh god, and debugging pre-Alint was terrible! I had to reload saves about twenty times just to get it to tell me all the times I'd forgotten a semi-colon.

[Donald Hebb]

Worst thing to do in general is to accidentally toggle "Automatic Hills" to ON.

[Lilith]

Auto-hills does save a lot of time for making ordinary hills. It's just really bad if you have any cliffs at all nearby.

[Kelandon]

Or any other terrains that don't work well with auto-hills, like walls.

[Niemand]

I don't think that I have yet had a very serious blunder with the editor. The behavior that the numberpad 5 paints the selected floor/terrain on the center square in the old 2D mode has annoyed me, as has the auto hill function. I also had some trouble back when I couldn't figure out any way to decrease height; only to increase it.

[Poit]

Quote:

Worst thing to do in general is to accidentally toggle "Automatic Hills" to ON

I hear you.

I've found the amount of costly time wasting mistakes has gone down dramatically since the creation of the 3D Editor. It's nice to be able to see what your actually doing.

[Niemand]

'Which way is the beam projector really facing?' was a major headache for me where using the old editor.

[Donald Hebb]

Quote:

Originally written by Niemand:
'Why the #$%& are there projectors in this scenario?' was a major headache for my players where using the editor.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Speaking of projectors, does it work to have the power source behind a wall? I'm interested in the whole home theatre thing, but that glowing ball on a pedestal is a little much.

 

Thanks for any help.

[Kelandon]

Quote:

Originally written by Jumpin' Salmon:
Speaking of projectors, does it work to have the power source behind a wall?

I believe it does not, but the only way to know is to try it. My experience with beam projectors is that they behave in all sorts of nonsensical ways.

[Niemand]

the power source must be on one of the spaces directly to the north, south, east, or west. So if you had

<|o

where < is the projector | is a wall, and o is the power source, the projector will not activate, because the powersource isn't close enough. However, you could make a terrain which is/looks like a wall and is also a powersource. Then, just putting the special wall next to the projector will turn it on.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Could a person just replace the graphic completely?

[Niemand]

If you mean replacing the power source's graphic, it's easier just to make a terrain:

Code:

 begindefineterrain x   import = y;//whatever you want it to look like   te_special_property = 38; //make it a power source 

Or you could import the standard power source and set a different graphic, yes.

[Dikiyoba]

Working with the 2D editor cost me hours of valuable time that could have been used more efficiently with the 3D editor...

 

Dikiyoba.

 

Edit: Spelling.

[Lilith]

I'm tempted to wait for the 4D editor before I start designing in earnest.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

 

Two days ago I naively imported a town into my scenario. It was glorious, I was finally going to activate one of the movies. As with all things, pain was immediate and overwhelming. I discovered that there are steps to take when importing a town.

 

0. Back up your work.

1. Add a new town to the existing scenario.

2. Switch so you are editing the new town.

3. Import the correct town (not zone) from the correct scenario, making sure the existing blank town is the same size as the town being imported.

4. Cross fingers.

 

I will have to start again.

 

Edit - It should be noted that it is exceedingly important to begin all BoA lists with a 0.

[Lowly Exile]

My biggest error was in thinking that this editor would be as easy as the Blades of Exile one. I have no computer knowledge and don't really care to learn scripting when all I really want is to just put out short stupid games for just me and a few friends. Though it was funny to see the cats flee in panic when I first opened the editor and screamed in shock.

 

EDIT: Ok... one friend...

 

RE-EDIT: Ok... just me. I have no friends.

[Kelandon]

Which leads me back to my main point: the best thing that could possibly happen for BoA is a better (more integrated) editor.

[Dintiradan]

My worst mistake with the Editor is not knowing about the existence of the few tools it has. Like manually changing the height square by square, THEN seeing that you can do it all at one.

 

Arghhhhhhhhh.

 

EDIT: Latest pet peeve: having to re-do all my walls just so I can place terrain by a wall.

 

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I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired. I am certainly not. And I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.

- Monty Python

[Thralni]

I'm to paranoid to leave an open scenario unsaved for more then five seconds, so that's not my problem. however, before discovering the 3D-editor, I had problem placing terrain. I always placed the wrong terrain (espacially the closets and such, which only have graphic in the editor, as it would appear in the game, and not like walls and tables have them). It cost me loads of time to correct all these small mistakes.

[nikki.]

The last one I made was to read the x co-ordinate wrongly on a space, and then enter it into a script.

 

Two hours of frantic searching for missing semi-colons, and hunting through the docs, I realised that my flip_terrain call WAS working - just not in the right place.

[Niemand]

I had a similar experience, not though not directly editor related, where had a script that was supposed to set off explosions randomly around wherever the party went, yet it only seemed to work in the NW and SE quadrants of the town. It took me several days of work to determine that my entire mistake was a line in the script, where I accidentally set the y coordinate for the explosion equal to the x coordinate, so that all of the explosions ended up distributed around the line y=x. In the end it was a little depressing when I realized what a small and stupid mistake it was.