Prefab Editor (Alpha)

[Amadeux]

Was able to replicate the fill tool lock up bug.

If you try to fill an area with a block that already has that block it will lock the program up.

 

[Slaan]

That looks pretty sweet, we're gonna need a lot of colours... I'm hitting 15-20 spawn areas per section in some areas. Some way to fine tune the areas once they're set in is sorely needed atm and this looks like it could plug that gap nice, really can't wait after doing 8 city parts by hand adding the sleepers in and tweaking them is fast becomming the new time consumer.

 

[Magoli]

@MagoliThe next release will contain full support for A16 prefab XMLs. In addition there will be a visual (and probably interactive) representation of the sleeper volumens.

So that's a sleeper volume in my current dev. version (the green rectangle). Each volume does have a different color and can be directly resized and moved like a desktop window (you can also use text fields to change the positions and dimensions):

Thanks Stompy. I hope I can find it (didn't try yet).^^

thx Pille - Iam really gonna love that tool more and more

Its magical - always when i want something u already got the solution for it - love it !!!

 

[Pille]

That would work well for selection,and likely well for the blue prefab insert too. Great solution!

I will put this feature in one of the next updates.^^

Was able to replicate the fill tool lock up bug.
If you try to fill an area with a block that already has that block it will lock the program up.

Thanks Amadeux. I was able to find and fix the bug (the fix will be included in the next release).

@Slaan, Magoli

I guess you have to wait a few more days because the next update is pretty big and the code for the sleeper volumes is quite "complicated" (at least compared to the rest of the project^^).

Btw. you can edit the colors of the volumes. So there will be an extra prefab file containing the color data (without this file you will get random colors).

Also the static-spawners seems to be gone now !!!

(no single vanilla-Prefab has got an spawner-entry anymore !!!)

Really? My automated xml evaluation function found prefabs using static spawners:

business_red_brick_06.xml

garageblue1.xml

I hope that's not a mistake.

 

[Pille]

Love the editor so far and was trying to figure out how the drawing tools worked a bit more.
I was able to lock it up a few times by trying to fill a full layer.

Now when trying to run the editor it just spins and won't load. Ran the autoupdater but got the same results. Any suggestions?

Great tool to start off with. This is my first time editing Prefabs outside of the game.
I've noticed that when using the fill tool the program sometimes locks up. No error or anything but becomes unresponsive and all buttons and actions become greyed out.

I've also had to redownload a few times even after updating as the Zombie.exe just seems to do nothing.

I would also like to make a suggestion to possibly add a circle tool like can be found at this site. It's worked really well for laying out some structures I've made in the past.

https://www.pixilart.com/

Thanks again!

That's really strange. I could have sworn that your comments were not there yesterday. So sorry that I have ignored you but your posts were invisible.^^

Do you still have problems when starting the editor? What's your windows version?

Thanks for your suggestion. There's already something similar but it's not activated (so not available to normal users). I am going to reactivate it as soon as I can.

 

[Guppycur]

New poster, his comments has to be approved first.

 

[Amadeux]

That's really strange. I could have sworn that your comments were not there yesterday. So sorry that I have ignored you but your posts were invisible.^^
Do you still have problems when starting the editor? What's your windows version?

Thanks for your suggestion. There's already something similar but it's not activated (so not available to normal users). I am going to reactivate it as soon as I can.

As Guppy said my posts have to be reviewed. I normally just lurk but I've been following along with everyone until now.

I'm using Windows 10 64bit and it hasn't happened recently but if I can replicate it I'll let you know.

Thanks!

 

[Pille]

The next update is ready!

A few features don't work yet and there are some small known bugs but I think it's already useful. So good luck.

Changelog v0.3 (July 11, 2017):

- added a few tool tips (not complete yet)

- added option "inverted mouse wheel" (related to "mouse wheel changes layers")

- added option for a15 xml support (the editor assumes you're working with alpha 16 unless you've activated this option)

- added a16 xml support

- added system to visualize and edit sleeper volumes

- added button for clearing inserted prefabs (This button removes the blue box. So you don't have to click on "fix position" and undo)

- changed layout to save space

- corrected spelling "Your current prefab is the small" -> "Your current prefab is too small"

- temporarily disabled "Layer-independent selection" (performance issues for large prefabs)

- renamed "side view 1" to "front view" and "side view 2" to "side view"

- fixed scaling for high dpi displays

- fixed bug related to fill tool

- fixed bug related to a15 xml support

I think I should give you some instructions:

1.

* This funny little rectangle is a sleeper volume. Each sleeper volume is represented by an item in the volume list (see 2.).

* Left click on the frame moves the sleeper volume (drag & drop).

* Right click on the frame resizes the volume. (This function has bugs)

* Double click on the frame selects and shows the corresponding item in the sleeper volume list

2.

* Each item in this list represents a volume on the grid.

* Double click somewhere here to show and highlight the corresponding volume on the grid.

3.

* This buttons add and remove sleeper volumes. Sometimes the new volumes will be "spawned" outside of the visible area. Please use the text fields "SleeperVolumeStart" to fix the issue.

Hints:

* Undo does not work for sleeper volume changes atm.

* Deactivate the a15 xml compatibility if you're working on an a16 prefab.

* Activate "write prefab XML" if you want to use the sleeper volume features

* The editor creates a new file ("prefabname".pille) which contains the color data of the sleeper volumes.

 

[Slaan]

Wow, gonna dive straight into this now, some seriously awesome features you've added there.

*edit*

Amazing, still to test some stuff properly but assuming it works ok, in 30 seconds I spotted a whole bunch of mistakes in some of my sleeper code.

This will open the door for amateur/new prefabbers in a big way, although simple enough in theory the XML code for the sleepers looks pretty daunting once your at 15+ volumes in a single prefab and it's nothing but a whole bunch of numbers. I think a lot of my mistakes have stemmed from having no way to easily see the area designated and doing a lot of math in my head and jotting in the wrong numbers. A lot of the errors (triggered emtpy volume) are gonna be much easier to track down now.

 

[Pille]

Wow, gonna dive straight into this now, some seriously awesome features you've added there.

I hope there are not too many serious bugs. I had not much time for testing.^^

Edit:

Glad to hear that you find this feature helpful. It was a lot of work.

 

[Laz Man]

Awesome update Pille! Can't want to try the sleeper function out. Given how sleepers are defined in the XMLs (array of data), a feature like this is much needed. Thank you!

 

[Slaan]

I've put maybe 50 hours into restoring my Hub so far, that's a lot of building time, a decent wedge of purging and correcting and far too much time painting haha but by a long mile I've spent more time writing/calculating sleeper volumes than anything else and without your efforts I think it's something only the hard core builders would put any real effort into.

You've saved me literally 100's of hours, I just fixed 3 of my prefabs in 20 mins, corrected all my mis-placed volumes, re-sized some of them, edited the game stage modifiers of some. Saved everything fine and the XML looks sound.

 

[Guppycur]

Man, that's just... Awesome.

 

[Pille]

Your young people are pretty easy to impress. ;p

 

[Guppycur]

Lol. My thing is you clearly listened to my mumbling and took it to heart. I appreciate the hell out of that.

 

[Pille]

Lol. My thing is you clearly listened to my mumbling and took it to heart.

Of course I listened. Your idea was excellent (could be one of mine ), so there was no reason to not implement it.

 

[Slaan]

Your young people are pretty easy to impress. ;p

You seriously underestimate the man hours required to populate a city sized prefab with sleepers =p , 400+ buildings and the spaces in-between them, I lost at least another inch of my hairline assessing the scale of work to be done manually this alpha.

 

[Laz Man]

You seriously underestimate the man hours required to populate a city sized prefab with sleepers =p , 400+ buildings and the spaces in-between them, I lost at least another inch of my hairline assessing the scale of work to be done manually this alpha.

I can only imagine given that the slaanhatten project is essentially an entire city converted into prefab files (.tts files) which now require sleeper spawn definitions. On the flip side, that means you have full control on where every sleeper spawn can occur in your entire city. Imagine the creative spawn definitions you can create on streets, alleys, wherever. Will truly be epic.

 

[Magoli]

fantstic awesome amazing work Pille

I will start to work with the sleeper-adding about weekend.

Question:

Could u add paintings to the advanced Exchanger ???

Here is my problem:

I need to change a block to another block, but i want a new painting on the destination-block.

And I have to do this to the whole prefabs-folder (as always)

thx ahead

Mag

 

[Pille]

I've put maybe 50 hours into restoring my Hub so far, that's a lot of building time, a decent wedge of purging and correcting and far too much time painting haha but by a long mile I've spent more time writing/calculating sleeper volumes than anything else and without your efforts I think it's something only the hard core builders would put any real effort into.

You seriously underestimate the man hours required to populate a city sized prefab with sleepers =p , 400+ buildings and the spaces in-between them, I lost at least another inch of my hairline assessing the scale of work to be done manually this alpha.

Sounds like the ultimate pita. You must be a very disciplined person.^^

@Magoli

It's already on my to-do list. Give me a few days.

@all

I think it's time to concentrate a bit more on non standard features (things that are interesting to Pille^^) . I am not going to stop implementing your suggestions (if they make sense and if I like them (all suggestions are very good so far)) but programming GUI related problems is quite boring sometimes. So I need distraction.

The next updates will be mainly about randomly generated prefabs (more precisely randomly generated interiors) and other gimmicks. The general idea is that we have random blocks (randomly chosen from a list of blocks) and random rooms (randomly chosen from a list of rooms; each element in this list is manually created by the user or automatically generated by an algorithm). So if we had a list with 4 basements and 3 attics, the editor would save 4*3 = 12 variants of one prefab.

It should be feasible to include a lot of prefabs into the rwg mixer:

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?62893-Technical-limits-of-rwg&p=632561#post632561

However, I am not sure whether that's a good plan or not.^^ Is there a negative effect on the ram usage if we include a few hundred new POIs or do you see another technical obstacle?

Any suggestions or comments on the topic?

Btw. Update time!

Changelog v0.3b (July 11, 2017):

- fixed minor bug related to highlighting function in side view

- made color indicator in sleeper volume list thicker

- made a16 xml reader case insensitive

- fixed crash caused by faulty XML files

Changelog v0.3c (July 12, 2017):

- added brush tool to editing tools

- added more tool tips

- added settings for filler tool

- changed filler tool (it should edit all block properties, not just the block id)

- fixed minor bug in undo/redo algorithm