Equipment\FX\Campaign Editor - New version 0.9.0

[Xerkis]

Hi Xerkis,

I hope to have it finished this weekend assuming I don't get roped into playing Barbies with my daughter!!!

Cheers

Mark

Don't forget to bring your Action Man (European version of G.I. Joe). I've always loved my "Deep Sea Diver" suit. He looked wonderful in my bathtub filled with water. His voice was never the same after that, but he looked nice.
http://www.actionmanhq.co.uk/pages/sold ... diver.html

I wonder what is in store for me this weekend? My girls are a bit past the Barbies stage.
They just don't understand that we are trying to win a war.

[Ranta]

Hi

Since a patch, influencing my equipment file is slowly approaching, I have a feature request for your editor .

Would it be possible, to store changs to an equipment file separately? Let me explain this: If I want to adapt to a new equipent file ( be it an officially patched one, or the one from another mod), I have to rework all my past changes bit for bit. It would be great, if I coul just click a button, "merge to" that merges my custom old file to the new. Hereby all modified entries form my old file (with the unit's id not set in the new file) are copied at the corresponding places in the new one and for every unit beeing different in both files, a warning is thrown and I can compare both stats and set the desired stats (maybe with default option: accept the new data).


Something like the "diff" opeator in linux . So that in total, I have not to look manually through all entries, which has changed and check what there is to fix.

Would you like to implement that? I hope it is not to much work

Best regards

Ranta

[Ranta]

Hi

I just made another observation

When dealing with a custom equipment file, with custom nations (e.g. new flag values) the corresponding units are not displayed / accessed by your editor, below a certain nation (but still below the "all" data_base). (Seems like you hardcoded the nations?)
While this is no greater harm, maybe you can add some cross-checking with grafics/overlays/flags.png and or data/nations.pzdat to recognize this entries correctly?

Best Regards

Ranta

PS. I like your editor very much, it helps a lot and saves much time

[Xerkis]

Also loving this editor too.
Awesome work.

Small request though.......
Re-order the tab stops please.
It jumps all around and also goes in to the Lable Boxes as well and realy shouldn't.

[mgarnett]

Hi

I just made another observation

When dealing with a custom equipment file, with custom nations (e.g. new flag values) the corresponding units are not displayed / accessed by your editor, below a certain nation (but still below the "all" data_base). (Seems like you hardcoded the nations?)
While this is no greater harm, maybe you can add some cross-checking with grafics/overlays/flags.png and or data/nations.pzdat to recognize this entries correctly?

Best Regards

Ranta

PS. I like your editor very much, it helps a lot and saves much time

Hi Ranta,

Thanks for that, yep I didn't account for the addition of new countries/nations so I will make some changes and implement in the next version

Cheers

Mark

[mgarnett]

Also loving this editor too.
Awesome work.

Small request though.......
Re-order the tab stops please.
It jumps all around and also goes in to the Lable Boxes as well and realy shouldn't.

Hi Xerkis,

You read my mind! I'm in the process of reordering them now.

Cheers

Mark

[mgarnett]

Hi Guys,

I have a question about the functionality of the campaign editor:

- Do you want the ability to insert scenarios into an already existing campaign path? Inserting a scenario will make all of the entry point labels for scenario paths and entry points that come after the inserted scenario invalid. As a result, do you want the campaign editor to automatically take care of this for you, or do you want to look after this manually?

- Ditto for deleting scenario paths.

- Do you want the ability to delete entire campaigns and it's corresponding scenario paths?

The tasks above aren't overly difficult, there's just a lot of consequences to take into account when taking a scenario out or adding a scenario into the middle of a currently existing path.

For example, if we have the following three campaigns:

Campaign 1 - starting label 1
Campaign 2 - starting label 13
Campaign 3 - starting label 22

If I then delete a scenario path out of campaign 1, I need to update the starting labels for the following two campaign to 12 and 21 and also, update all of the scenario paths themselves so that the major victory, marginal victory and loss paths point to the correct labels.

Cheers

Mark

[mgarnett]

Hi

I just made another observation

When dealing with a custom equipment file, with custom nations (e.g. new flag values) the corresponding units are not displayed / accessed by your editor, below a certain nation (but still below the "all" data_base). (Seems like you hardcoded the nations?)
While this is no greater harm, maybe you can add some cross-checking with grafics/overlays/flags.png and or data/nations.pzdat to recognize this entries correctly?

Best Regards

Ranta

PS. I like your editor very much, it helps a lot and saves much time

Hi Ranta,

Thanks for that, yep I didn't account for the addition of new countries/nations so I will make some changes and implement in the next version

Cheers

Mark

Hi Ranta,

I've just been looking into this to see how I can approach it and I have a question, if you have a custom country number, say 28, how do I equate a number with a country name when the country name isn't stored anywhere in the equipment file? The only way I can think of approaching this is to move the country names to a text file ordered by flag ID value and then when you have a new country, the editor looks into the text file for the name.

There would be a couple of issues with this:

1. The text file would need to stay ordered otherwise the flag ID's would refer to incorrect countries so it would be easier for a user to make mistakes with this.

2. An edited equipment file containing additional countries would not mean anything without the associated text file, which would mean other people couldn't edit your file without your text file (i.e. you may have country 28 = Scotland and I might have made country 28 = Mexico).

I'm happy to take suggestions.

I just thought of a second option, could we (as in the community) come up with a "standard" list of countries and associaed ID's? This would solve the issue as country ID's across databases would be constant.

Cheers

Mark

[El_Condoro]

Mark, the last couple of posts in this thread may help: viewtopic.php?t=27131

As for the campaign editor, I noticed that my campaign.pzdat, which has a number of added scenarios as you've seen, did not display that campaign correctly. Because I have used the first slot (from the Tutorial campaign) as my start point it just showed the rows that are normally associated with the tutorial - it didn't check logically through to thread the scenarios together. If that could be done it would make clicking on a campaign name list all the associated scenarios.

Personally, I think it would be great if scenario and campaign details could be edited from the editor. As an additional really nice to have: the ability to see and edit briefings from the editor. One step at a time, though...

Cheers

[mgarnett]

Mark, the last couple of posts in this thread may help: viewtopic.php?t=27131

As for the campaign editor, I noticed that my campaign.pzdat, which has a number of added scenarios as you've seen, did not display that campaign correctly. Because I have used the first slot (from the Tutorial campaign) as my start point it just showed the rows that are normally associated with the tutorial - it didn't check logically through to thread the scenarios together. If that could be done it would make clicking on a campaign name list all the associated scenarios.

Personally, I think it would be great if scenario and campaign details could be edited from the editor. As an additional really nice to have: the ability to see and edit briefings from the editor. One step at a time, though...

Cheers

Thanks El Contoro,

At the moment, the code is pretty "dumb" in that it just uses the entry point data to work out the corresponding scenarios. I'm still parsing the scenario entries, just not doing anything with it at the moment until I work out what features need to be implemented. Thanks also for the link.

Cheers

Mark

[Xerkis]

Are you not able to use the nations.pzdat file for the adding country?

Also to answer the campaign editor question of yours. It is doing what you described that keeps messing me up. It would be nice to have your program do it for me…


...... it's more coding for you, but you did say you are using this to learn .net .... so learn away.

[Ranta]

Hi

Thanks a lot for the effort you put into it, im highly delighted

1. As for adding new nations, why not work with the nations.pzdat, and maybe store it, so one can distinguish between beteen differet ones?
So a warning is thrown when working with different nation files.

2. As mentioned above ( by me), are you planning on a compare or merge concept or function, for different equipment files?

3. The thing with campaigns is, that the beginning scenarios are harcoded (I think in the .htm files). I was not able to start at another sccenario as poland (for the poland campaign). But this could be prevented by renaming my new scenario to "poland" and just loading my custom maps there (as .pzscn file). I realy think this is NOT dependend on the NUMBER of the scenario but on the NAME (though I am not sure).
So a workaround would be some renaming in the first scenario (check my campaign file for details viewtopic.php?t=26817). Essentially, if not dealing with the first scenario, just always add entries at the end of campaigns.pzdat, so that starting numbers are not disturbed (if I was mistaken ). Though for a sensible representation in the editor the scenarios might be temporary reordered (for visualisation only).

I think of something like:
- Allways add data/scenarios at the end of the file (standard case)
- For campaign beginning some workaround like shown above is needed (one time), in the campaign.pzdat (special case)
- Presentation in your editor is an ordered list of labes (scenario names), which can be dragged and dropped in the desired order, this is not the same order as in the .pzdat, but induced by the entrie's jumpoints
- labes consists of detail fields, for map names etc (entries in campaigns.pzdat)
- labes can be added (new entry appended at campaigns.pzdat)
If you save (or reorder, add something), the jumppoints in the campaigns.pzdat are modiefied, but the entries itelfe are not moved (maybe except for a new start scenario)

I hope you get my point and it is of any use

Best regards

Ranta

[Xerkis]

3. The thing with campaigns is, that the beginning scenarios are harcoded (I think in the .htm files). I was not able to start at another sccenario as poland (for the poland campaign).

In the gamesetup.htm file replace one of the campaigns with your starting point. example: "StartTutorial" with "MyStart"

..... Obviously save game files before hand.

[mgarnett]

Hi Guys,

I wanted to send through a quick update. Work on the campaign editor continues and is much more work than I originally anticipated. Adding, deleting and removing entries is the easy part but factoring in the changes to all the other entries as a result is taking me a little longer to implement. Then making sure that it all fits back together and taking into account entries that are no longer workable is a little more difficult. For example, you might decide to delete a scenario path and if so, all other paths that point to the deleted path are now illegal entries, handling this is difficult from a design perspective.

I'm at the point at the moment where the adding, removing, deleting and inserting code is implemented and is working great. I'm now working on taking into account the effect of these actions and working out what entries need to be amended as a result of the changes. I'm getting there, it's just taking a little longer than originally thought so please bear with me.

Cheers

Mark

[VPaulus]

Take your time, Mark.
You're doing a fine job.

[Xerkis]

Awesome work Mark.
This is turning in to a real powerhouse of a tool.

The help screen for the flags was a nice (and greatly needed) addition.

Thanks

[Ranta]

thanks a lot

awsome work

[PG2000]

Thank you very much for your great work !!!

[El_Condoro]

For campaign beginning some workaround like shown above is needed (one time), in the campaign.pzdat (special case)

What I did for my campaign that I'm working on is use the first Tutorial slot and just change all the result fields, prestige and briefings. Leave it as "Tutorial" because, as Ranta points out the name is important. Then use that first entry to point to all the following scenarios that have been added at the end of the list. The interesting thing with using the Tutorial name slot is that it must be hard coded to set the tutorial messages to on because every time I start this campaign they pop up.

[AgentX]

What I did for my campaign that I'm working on is use the first Tutorial slot and just change all the result fields, prestige and briefings. Leave it as "Tutorial" because, as Ranta points out the name is important. Then use that first entry to point to all the following scenarios that have been added at the end of the list. The interesting thing with using the Tutorial name slot is that it must be hard coded to set the tutorial messages to on because every time I start this campaign they pop up.

Another drawback to using the Tutorial slot is that the player can't set the difficulty settings (or any of the other settings: fog of war, weather, supply). A couple of modders were doing that on their modded campaigns and that was the result. If you are releasing your mod, you may want to consider using the normal campaign slot, so we can have control over the settings. Most (really should be everyone) use the Generic Mod Enabler so there's no need to make backup files and the original files stay intact. Just something to think about, El_Condoro. It's nice to be able to set the difficulty level (I always play with the other settings on, but some may want to change those as well).