kartoFlane wrote:*shrug* it makes little sense to place a widget that is always visible and in plain view, if it only controls the behaviour of a single object of a single type. Much better to place it in a context popup menu.
Besides, the less things are immediately visible in the main window, the less overwhelming the program feels.
At least, that's the design theory I have.
On the other hand, there's a point where it changes from "less overwhelming" to "unintuitive."
I don't know about anybody else, but when I want to do anything with a weapon, I usually end up clicking it a dozen or more times in various ways until I find the click that does what I want. If instead while in Weapon mode I could click an existing weapon and see all of its stats in a popup, I'd find that far easier to do.
That said, SL is 10,000 times better than editing the raw files
Well, making certain windows appear when SL is in a set mode could work.
kartoFlane wrote:*shrug* it makes little sense to place a widget that is always visible and in plain view, if it only controls the behaviour of a single object of a single type. Much better to place it in a context popup menu.
Besides, the less things are immediately visible in the main window, the less overwhelming the program feels.
At least, that's the design theory I have.
On the other hand, there's a point where it changes from "less overwhelming" to "unintuitive."
I don't know about anybody else, but when I want to do anything with a weapon, I usually end up clicking it a dozen or more times in various ways until I find the click that does what I want. If instead while in Weapon mode I could click an existing weapon and see all of its stats in a popup, I'd find that far easier to do.
That said, SL is 10,000 times better than editing the raw files
LOL- Honestly i NEVER use superluminal to place / rotate weapons. It takes more time that doing it manually , almost for me, because the position they have in superluminal is not always 100% accurate and i always ended modifying the txt files to get the exact position (sometimes by 2 or 3 pixels, but..). When i finish the design in superluminal i just export the ship and i go directly to the xml file of the ship and i place the weapon mounts and coordinates there, using photoshop with the ship image loaded to see the exact pixel coordinate i want the weapon to be placed. This way i always get the exact position in the first attempt, while with superluminal (since as far as i know it doesnt have a coordinate system to place weapons, just doing it with the mouse.. unless that changed in later versions, i dunno) i always need to re-position the weapons, even if it is only by 2 or 3 pixels. This process only takes about 2 minutes.. or something like that.
speedoflight wrote:since as far as i know it doesnt have a coordinate system to place weapons, just doing it with the mouse.. unless that changed in later versions, i dunno
I recall I implemented single-pixel nudge via arrow keys sometime back in March...
I don't know about any issues with coordinates being wrong, but I haven't compared the exported values with ones checked manually via Photoshop, either... Guess I'll have to take a look.
Yup, but wat i meant was, for example, the option to allow the user to manually set the coordinates instead of using arrow keys and so on. That way, combined with photoshop
But as i said, i start using the manual method long time ago, even when i was not too experienced in modding, and since i have photoshop with the hull image loaded opened all the time, while im using superluminal (to make cloak at the same time, or shields, etc) i am used the manual method. And since i touch more files, like the blueprints one (specially when only vanilla weapons are loaded and u cant add custom ones from superluminal) i am used to that method. I use superluminal to load the ship hull image, place the rooms, place the shields and thats it. After that, i export the ship and i modify the files manually. I know maybe this takes a little more time, but its the way im used to. And because when you are modding you will touch and modify some values of the blue prints, autoblueprints and other files and after you have the ship done, modifying values manually is faster than loading superluminal again and load the project, export again and so on..
Oh, I guess that one.
It's pretty simple actually, but can not be done inside the editor - you have to fiddle with layout files yourself.
I have to run ATM, but I'll write something up either today or tomorrow.
Edit
Sorry for the delay, the 0x0 rooms were causing some issues, and I wanted to have full understanding before writing anything.
6. Creating 0x0 (non-targetable) Rooms
Further testing has shown that the system can still be damaged by solar flares - for this reason, it is recommended to only use this feature on automatic player ships (so that the player can still repair the system), or enemy ships. Alternatively, your mod can remove sun environment hazards to prevent that issue.
It is possible to place rooms with 0 width and 0 height, which have some interesting properties, for example rendering the system housed inside these rooms effectively indestructible. The tradeoff is that the stations for these rooms cannot be manned.
This can be done either in the editor, or by hand:
In the editor
First, you need version 13-08-29 or later of Superluminal.
Second, you have to enable 0x0 rooms - this is done by going to Edit > Enable Zero Rooms.
This option allows you to change rooms' dimensions to 0 by resizing. A room with 0 width or height takes about 2/3 of a grid cell in that dimension. So 0x0 rooms look like squares taking up 2/3 of a grid cell.
.
By hand
This requires you to edit the shipname.txt layout file manually in a text editor.
These layout files have their own, specific syntax, which is detailed here.
If you're familiar with the syntax of the layout files, creating a 0x0 rooms is trivially easy.
You have to seek out the room you're interested in -- by index, or by position -- and change both its width and height to 0.
Technically, setting only one of those should yield the same results, however it is likely that this would cause the room to be vulnerable to beams.
Now, setting the width and height to 0 is not enough -- the room can still be targeted by the AI, be it enemy or player's drones. Since the FTL's damage system is collision-based, we can prevent the 0x0 room from being hit by placing it "underneath" another room. This will cause all projectiles to hit the normal room instead.
To do this, you have to modify the 0x0 room's position, so that it'll end up inside of another room, or between two or more rooms.
I'm having a slight problem, I set up a ship following Vangard of Valor's vid and everything looks fine, but in the hanger I can see the rooms, poeple, but I can't see my ship, a huge excamation point is what I see, please help?
This means that either hull or floor image doesn't exist, or is wrongly linked / missing from image namespace.
Have you moved/renamed/deleted the image you've linked in the editor before you've exported the ship?
