So Dragon is saying he prefers WYSIWYG and everyone else wants to edit their HTML in Notepad? Why not link PCS2 and table editing, then?
Not a bad idea, by the way, it could be rather useful, but PCS2 would have to be updated a lot more often. A few more improvements, like being able to display thruster and glowpoint bitmaps, trails and maneuvering thrusters could make more than a few lives much easier. But I doubt that's gonna happen.
What do you mean "Guess the normal?" 3D Max has the ability to tell you what the angle of the centerpoint of the object/dummy or whatever. I'm very certain Blender is capable of this, too.
Also, PCS2 allows you to type in the XYZ coordinates of glowpoints and thrusters, am I right? What's wrong with writing down the coordinates of your dummy object in 3DS Max/Blender/whatever and then typing them in PCS2?
From an outsider's perspective, that just sounds like 300% extra effort and so much more of a PITA than click and drag.
Precisely. Intrasystem Gate from WiH, one of my personal best, has 27 banks, 18 of them with two glowpoints, the rest with many more. Tabling this would literally take all day. Not to mention I'm not spending 1200$ for a 3DS max, nor learning Blender and it's arcane interface and shortcuts to do what I do in PCS2 with mouse.
Dragon, can you give a detailed step-by-step walkthrough of what you would have to do to glowpoint / change the glowpoints on a model with the way you want things done, and then the way they want it done? Maybe then a solution will be brought forward that everyone will find livable.
Let's assume we have a new glowpoint config under index "2".
My way:
Open up a model.
Go to "glowpoints" tab, change the "type" field to 2 for each bank.
Save the model.
Practical note: With practice, this is the sort of thing you can do extremely fast. You don't move your keyboard finger, only mouse and you do it in a single pattern. This is menial, but not annoying, and there's no room for error, you always get it right first time. Even if you've got multiple types to assign, it's not much slower, even if you get into double digits.
Now, the table way (as mentioned here:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=81376.msg1632792#msg1632792):
Open up the model for reference (well, not necessary in this example, but in more complicated operations you need it).
Open up ships.tbl .
Write the ships.tbl field name.
Write "2", then a string of numbers equal to the number of glowpoint banks on a ship (in case of the intrasystem gate, you'll be typing all numbers from 1 to 27).
Save the table.
(im)Practical note: This means manually typing a lot of numbers. The more types you have, the more of this you have to write, with eventual parentheses, commas and whatever. Not to mention it doesn't quit have the "dynamic" (you look at the bank in PCS2, think "I want a type 4 here" and change immediately that without switching from PCS2 to table), and you have to count the banks manually in order to make out which is which, as PCS2 doesn't display the numbers next to them.
Comparison: Let's take the gate, and let's say you have 27 lighting presets (this is an exaggerated example, but gets the point across).
In my way, you type 27 numbers directly in the model, nothing more.
In tabled way, you type something like "(1-1, 1-2,... ...27-27)", along with all the syntax stuff. And if you skip a separator, a comma or whatever you have to look at this unwieldy string and search for a typo. Twice as many numbers, a lot more work.
Now, this might not seem like a big deal, and I might seem like I'm making much ado about nothing, and exaggerating too much to get the point across. But keep in mind that I'm going to be implementing this for two entire fleets in WiH, many of them have enormous glowpoint counts (I know, I did them). And not only that, I'll have to make sure this looks good, and will most likely add some more points. It suddenly accumulates a great deal of work.
you dont do the glowpoints in the table you still do them in the model the only thing you do in the table is THE LIGHTSOURCE the glowpoint creates i think theres a misunderstanding on that part by some readers here.
I know you don't intend to change glowpoints themselves, I was just pointing out how impractical table-based points are. However, assigning the lightsource should also be done in model, via "type" field.
