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Quote:

Devnullicus said:
Hmmm, hadn't thought about moving them around in the file. Could be done relatively easily, but would make the sorting I do in the list-view a bit harder. I'll have to think about a good way to do it. With a good GUI, I'm not sure why you'd care about the order in the text file, honestly.

In case Fyron's response wasn't clear enough: the order in the text file determines the order in-game (at least when alpha sorting is off).

For facilities, the "Facility Group" seems to control the order within the game. Within a particular Facility Group, I would guess the order to be the same as in the file, but I haven't verified that.

For components, I would guess that the "General Group" field works similarly to "Facility Group", but again, haven't verified that.

As for how I'm doing the sorting, it can currently be sorted in ascending or descending order by name or by facility group. I'm using some slightly modified code I found on Microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319401

But yes, now that I think about it, alphabetical sorting doesn't make as much sense. I think I'll modify it so you can drag the facilities to whatever order you wish and get rid of the alpha-sorting.

Or maybe I'll just add some info to make it know what order to put it in the file, because the alpha-sorting by name or facility group is actually kind of useful as well. Will have to think a bit more on this one.

Thanks for the suggestions!

this is insanely ultimate
Devnullicus, I tip my hat to you.

For components, I would guess that the "General Group" field works similarly to "Facility Group", but again, haven't verified that.

Nope, just one big list for components. You can use component groups in filters (which makes the list only show components in that group), but those are very slow to use compared to good sorting.

Or maybe I'll just add some info to make it know what order to put it in the file, because the alpha-sorting by name or facility group is actually kind of useful as well.

I think you run the risk of making a confusing interface here. You want to let the user move the items, but still want it alphasorted? You've got to go one way or the other here, or provide some sort of option to switch between them.

Wow, that looks like a very handy and helpful program for modding. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Very nice!!

The component group is used for prioritizing repairs.
I find that there tends to be serious conflicts between filtering on that and getting useful repair priorities.

Since the order of components is everything a filter is, but better, and bad repair priorities have no workaround, repair priorities win.

Any chance youll do one for events?

My plan is to do editors for all the data files and maybe the racial data files as well. Currently, I'm on vacation and having fun doing the code for this. When my vacation ends in a week and a half or so, I doubt I'll have a lot of time to work on this any more, so we'll see how much I get done by then.

Whatever I get done, I'll release along with full source code in case anyone feels like finishing up what I don't have time for.

I'm currently just about done with Facilities - I still have to finish up the reordering, adding and deleting items from the various lists, and saving the data back to the file. I also have the formula wizard to do, and I suspect that will take much of tomorrow.

At this point, I think I have a good idea of how to do most of the rest of the data files, so they should start going quicker. Except for Components, most of the rest of the data files aren't as complex. Components is what I'm planning on next - I'm guessing I'll get to those by sometime tomorrow. After that, I could probably do Events, but have no definite priorities yet.

The best part about this is that I'm having a blast and learning a new language (C#) as well http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I suspect I'd be getting this done a little faster if I wasn't having to look up so much syntax, but even so, I'm finding C# to be one of the fastest development languages for this kind of task I've ever used. I'm pretty impressed with how easy this program has been to throw together so far.

Devnullicus, this is awesome. Should be a huge help. Any chance to do this for AI scripts? I personally that AI is the most "broken" part of the game and needs a ton of modder help.

Just a quick update. The Facilities Editor UI is pretty much in final form and I'm starting on the formula parser/wizard. Here's a screenshot of what the editor looks like now.

http://www.devnullsoftware.com/img/s...es_editor2.jpg