WW Editor?

[Ripcord O'Reilly]

Ripcord: Vroomfondel, why don't we think of cool ideas like this?

Fingers: I dunno. Our brains must be too highly-trained, Majikthise.

Neat stuff, Draxis. Hope you can bring at least the ship editor to a v1.0 (eventually - Good luck with exams!). At some point here, we'll have to do a press release with you about this. Stay in touch & thanks for spending the time to create a really cool tool!

[Draxis]

Thanks for the comments ripcord. I think all the hull editor needs is a fragment viewer / setter, and probably some input validation. I am not aware of any other properties that cannot be changed. Ship flags perhaps, and a way of setting a ships frames file...always more to get done

[Fingers]

Hi Draxis, this looks really really cool! We actually talked early on about shipping the game with some kind of an editor but it got left out as we concentrated on just getting the game done... As you probably know by now a full "mod editor" would be a pretty big endeavour.

Some feedback based on the pix (can't download it right now):
- it would be nice to show the slot shapes on the silhouette. This'll help you place them so that they won't overlap in the game.
- also displaying the ship icon/sprite frames would be cool..
- is your editor modular, e.g. does it load the parameters and flag names from a configuration file? Future updates of WW may add new flags and other parameters (just like 1.1 did).

[Draxis]

Working on a WW editor has been very interesting, of all the editors I have made, this one has sucked up the most time. Not sure why. Anyways, I tracked down what I thought was a bug in my program to 2 of your data files:

muk_ftr.ini - Line 12 - missing an un-used value from the thruster line
pri_ftr.ini - Line 12 - same as above.

Lines read: 'THRU 32 53 128 188 180 1'
Should read: 'THRU 32 53 128 188 180 0 1

Or something like that...

Fingers:

I tried creating item slot shapes, but I couldnt see how to get PaintX to use alpha channels for transparency. It looked pretty terrible without, particularly on the sprite view (where they overlapped a lot), so abandoned that for the colour dots. It may work ok with slot shapes just on the silhouette, I will look into it sometime.

Ship sprites are drawn, frame outlines will be fairly easy to add - changing frames will get done the same time as fragments. Ship Icons, I am planning to get that implemented along with items, I have never done offset or cropping on VB images before, not sure how much functionality VB or PaintX has in that area.

Currently, the parameter data (like for flags) is hardcoded. The prototype of the item editor I am working on is dynamic, would be easy to shift the data to a configuartion file and read it in that way.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions

[Nimnio]

Most impressive, Draxis. What sorts of tools are you using?

[Ace_Garp]

That looks nice!
What are you using to write it, and will there be any chance of a Mac version ;-)
Would you be willing to release the source-code if someone (not me) is willing to have a go at porting it?
Anyway - good job.

Have to start thinking of some mods of my own to give to this fine little space-faring community! (Can't make any promises about the quality though)

[Draxis]

Originaly I was using VB.NET, which is fairly portable (.NET is an MS equivalent of Java; if there is a .NET virtual machine for an OS, it can use anything that targets the framework). However, .NET was a pain to work with, so the tool is being developed in Visual Basic 6. I have no idea if a VB6 exe will run on a mac - unless there is a good emulator, I think it is unlikely.

Source code is available with the download.

I have had only had a couple of hours to work on this the last 3/4 weeks, and I dont expect to have much free time for a couple more weeks due to exams. If anyone has the will and the skill to continue development, please do