Formation Editor Posted

[raynor]

Over in the Mods Forum, I posted a simple formation editor. It displays the formation as a 19x19 grid/board with tiles that you can move around or off the board onto a 'palette'. It also lets you assign types either singly or en masse to ships based on the types from DefaultDesignTypes. It lets you add types to this file.

Let me know what you think. I included my email address both in the readme and in the Program Help.

Thanks to jpinard and to the TDM_ModPack crew for their help on figuring some stuff out for this.

[Zeno42]

Raynor,

Looks pretty good. A nice graphical interpretation of a file that's a pain to make intuitive sense of in text form.

My only suggestions would be:
-Ability to select formations by name in addition to paging through by "Next" and "Previous".

-When I select a position to move there ought to be some indicator (highlight, color-change, etc) of which position I selected. Currently it seems the leader is highlighted in red, but no indicator exists for the selected "tile".

-Don't automatically save on exit - you should probably at least ask so if I decide to scrap everything and exist it doesn't save on me anyway.

Regards,
--Zeno

[This message has been edited by Zeno42 (edited 07 March 2001).]

[raynor]

Thanks for taking a look at it, Zeno!

Those are some good ideas. I'll add them in the next release.

Arggh! Under Tools menu is an option you can uncheck to turn off Autosave of the formation file. I meant to set the default to off when I built the latest Version. But I goofed. Sorry about that! If you turn it off, it will remember the setting the next time you run it.

Also, thanks for pointing out that the leader is indicated by the 'L' with the red outline. I should have documented that.

Hopefully, some of the more creative folks out there will play with this and create some cool new formations like the new Dark Wing that shipped with the TDM_ModPack.

A couple of minor things I discovered:

First, you can go to Empire Status->Strategies->Formation and check/uncheck boxes next to the ship types that will break formation. This will let you make the transports maintain their position in the formation instead of hiding in the corner.

Second, my program lets you edit the DefaultDesignTypes.txt. If you like, you can delete all of the default types and replace them with your own. However, the game seems to require the default types but not always. I tried deleting all of them and adding my own. Here is what I observed when I started a new game and designed a new ship:

QuickStart with Amon Krie - only new type
Add Existing Amon Krie - default types + new one
Create new race - only new one
Load existing race (the one I just created and saved) - default types + new one

This is pretty weird. Could someone else please test this and see if they get the same behavior?

Thanks again for your comments, Zeno.

[jpinard]

Cool, excellent work Raynorr