Subset Games Forum

But how could you show the out side of the ship and the inside? Also the tardis would only work if you could teleport inside enemy ships

Darkfrost wrote:Should it spit out just the xml for the ship, or automatically replace whatever ship you edited in the blueprints.xml file? Or even repack it back into the data.dat? Or just export a file to be loaded into that mod manager?

Or, add options for all of the above? I'm not quite sure how people would want to use it, so feedback is awesome Bear in mind more options takes longer, what would you want the most?

personally i'd love to just get the ship xml atm, and maybe get the other options in a later update.
atm. I just want to mess around with ship designs

Darkfrost wrote:So, pretty major question - How streamlined would you like this to be?

Should it spit out just the xml for the ship, or automatically replace whatever ship you edited in the blueprints.xml file? Or even repack it back into the data.dat? Or just export a file to be loaded into that mod manager?

Or, add options for all of the above? I'm not quite sure how people would want to use it, so feedback is awesome Bear in mind more options takes longer, what would you want the most?

I would suggest a \shipname\ subdirectory wherever the editor is installed.
Say you begin work on a ship and you call it TestCruiser. The editor makes a subfolder like so:

Then all of the changes you make are written to \data and \img directories in that folder. Import a ship_base.png, it gets copied to TestCruiser\img\ships...
If it's not too fancy, maybe an "Export" button that zips up the appropriate data and resource directories. If that sounds like too much work, even just an "open folder" button so you can do it manually.

As an option, if you plan on making it a player ship, pointing out which ship you want to overwrite would be a good idea - then all of your changes would be written to something like \Energy_Cruiser\ and the files renamed appropriately to replace the existing one.

A quick question for my own curiosity - what XML library are you using to read/write the XML? I was trying to come up with a way to merge the XML files for the Mod Manager, and I was running into the issue of both Ruby and Python's libxml2 libraries either not handling the base game's XML very well (some attributes don't have spaces, html parsers don't maintain capitalization, etc, etc).

Any chance you could try your parser loading up the base game's "blueprints.xml", and see if it loads and maps it entirely, rather than cutting off midway through?

Darkfrost wrote:Started work on the XML loading
All the weapon data etc is loaded from the XML, so if you're added a bunch of custom weapons, no problem, they'll show up (I might add a weapon editor too at some point, dunno, would people want this?)

This looks incredible. I'm actually a little miffed because I began to write a ship editor as well, but you're significantly further along and contrary to what someone else stated, I don't much see the purpose of writing a competing editor when there's so much positive work to do on this one. After getting the functionality in place, do you intend to give the GUI the FTL "look and feel"?

And yes, a weapon editor would be awesome. Are you planning to release the source for your project? I skimmed the topic and didn't see any release info, apologies if I missed it.

Kieve wrote:I would suggest a \shipname\ subdirectory wherever the editor is installed.

Aha, that's a good idea!

Icehawk78 wrote:what XML library are you using to read/write the XML? I was trying to come up with a way to merge the XML files for the Mod Manager, and I was running into the issue of both Ruby and Python's libxml2 libraries either not handling the base game's XML very well (some attributes don't have spaces, html parsers don't maintain capitalization, etc, etc).

Hah! Good question, yeah, that one took me a while to get worked out, since there's a large amount of malformed / invalid XML in the original (I wonder if the devs hand-wrote it?)
I ended up using the HTML Agility Pack - It's great because it's designed for 'real world' html code, so it's very tolerant of various issues.
At the moment, I load up all the weapons and ships from blueprints.xml, and I haven't seen any problems doing this.

When I export the XML back out, I just use any old XML exporter, since I can make sure it's formatted correctly on export, in this case, I'm using XMLWriter in .NET

This looks incredible. I'm actually a little miffed because I began to write a ship editor as well, but you're significantly further along and contrary to what someone else stated, I don't much see the purpose of writing a competing editor when there's so much positive work to do on this one. After getting the functionality in place, do you intend to give the GUI the FTL "look and feel"?

Yeah, I checked if anyone else was working on one before I started mine, couldn't see any... After I posted saying I was working on one, within a couple of days so did a couple of other people!

As for an FTL look and feel, I've been trying to give the main ship designing window one, but for the WinForms bit that are just mainly for just typing in info, I'm not sure

Are you planning to release the source for your project? I skimmed the topic and didn't see any release info, apologies if I missed it.

Yes! However, It needs a lot of tidying up before I'm willing to, I hate releasing messy code! But yeah, once it's usable and tidied up, and I've fixed up the GUI, I'll probably throw it up on GitHub

Can't wait for this to be available! I will rule the federation with this: http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2 ... -class.png

New screenshots!

http://imgur.com/cLzAI,jT3pl,sqmB8,m31P6,O5AOW#0
(It's a gallery)

Darkfrost wrote:New screenshots!

http://imgur.com/cLzAI,jT3pl,sqmB8,m31P6,O5AOW#0
(It's a gallery)

Seriously, when are we lowly shipbuilders gonna get to play with this?

Haha, it still needs a lot of work, especially on the main, actual room editing screen, but hopefully in a couple of days