Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Tools => Topic started by: m!m on December 14, 2010, 11:54:46 am
-
Today I want to present a project of mine that aims at creating a new editor for editing FreeSpace table files.
Current features are:
- Syntax highlighting
- Parsing of table files to generate a table outline
- A wizard to create table files with help of templates
- Documentation of table elements :nod: (A big thanks to the FreeSpace wiki at this point)
- (limited) Content assist
- Table to spreadsheet exporter (currently supported formats: CSV, XLS)
- Open tables out of VP files
Planned Features:
- Format table
- Error checking
- Project System
Open tables out of VP files
The project is written in Java with help of the QT Jambi framework just for those who may be interested in this.
Now that you skipped that part here are some pictures:
Small Overview
(http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/2002/overviewm.png)
The Table Explorer:
(http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/5759/tableexplorer.png)
Documentation in action:
(http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/8461/documentation.png)
Content assistTM:
(http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/5899/contentassist.png)
And the wizard to create table files:
(http://img573.imageshack.us/img573/1859/tablewizard.png)
Comments, thoughts, feature requests or something else?
-
Oh dear. Poor Sigtau. I guess we'll have two table editors.
Can this export to spreadsheets, or import from? That was the big feature Sigtau's Tableview 2 was headed for.
-
Currently it doesn't support this but it would be easy to implement.
-
That would be fantastic, and make Fury very happy. Well done.
-
+1 for spreadsheet support
-
What would be really cool? If it loaded all the tables done in the mod and whispered you the data from them, for example in ships.tbl, it would automatically let you choose from the armor types or weapons you specified in other tables.
-
I already planed some kind of project system for mods and with full support for things like this. But that is far away and the next feature will be the spreadsheet exporter.
-
Wow, what a ****in' oneup. :(
If there's already a project that beat me to it, I suppose I'll back down and work on some other utility.
No offense to m!m... it's just that I was really planning on finishing it, but his project beats the **** out of mine on many levels, so I'm just going to kindly let him take the reigns since mine is inferior feature-wise.
-
il still use notepad++, it has syntax highlighting for every language i use, and i can write lua and tables in the same program.
not to say anything is wrong here, its good to have a variety of tools to work with.
-
For some reason :nervous: I prefer the interface on sigtau's tbl editor more, looking back at the old thread, but with neither program released (at least what my eyes are seeing) I have no comment.
/looks at the pictures to m!m's tool again
Ouch damn ok now I do think it's a major one-up. That said, to +1 tblview2 (sort-of), I am sick and tired of scrolling back and forth between entries in an individual table in Notepad++ even though I occasionally have to do so (especially with multiple similar ships since templates are :doubt: at best...)
Still... different modder, different way of working, different tools, otherwise how would one explain people using max, blender, wings etc...
@m!m those multiple $Name fields in the Table Explorer picture just drive me crazy somehow... no way for it to display the string right next to it? e.g. $Name: Coward instead of just $Name...
-
@sigtau Please don't stop your project just because of this as your program has clearly it's own distinct features that mine doesn't have. And also, as noted, it's always better to have two programs than one. :)
those multiple $Name fields in the Table Explorer picture just drive me crazy somehow... no way for it to display the string right next to it? e.g. $Name: Coward instead of just $Name...
The first four screenshots are old and I changed the behavior to display elements like <Element>:<Value>. Here's a screenshot of the new version:
(http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/8499/newtableexplorer.png)
-
I really look forward to seeing both this one and Sigtau's. Table editing is one of the few modding things i can actually do, and having a program to organise it and show highlighting like this will be immesurably useful when working on them. :)
-
I now have support for exporting table files to Spreadsheet in either CSV or XLS format and now the program can also open VP files.
-
bloody hell you are working fast on this, wouldn't mind getting my hands on this right now
-
I already had a full VP editor laying around and I
stole borrowed the spreadsheet exporter from Goober :P
Currently this is quite buggy and you would have to download the Qt Jambi framework so it wouldn't be worth the effort. :P but I already thought of an alpha release.
-
Wait wait wait, I thought XLS was a closed format?
-
and I stole borrowed the spreadsheet exporter from Goober :P
Ha! :D Glad I could help contribute. :)
-
If there's already a project that beat me to it, I suppose I'll back down and work on some other utility.
You could always come work on PCS2 instead!
-
Wait wait wait, I thought XLS was a closed format?
Doesn't mean no one ever reverse engineered it.
-
I'm using a library named jExcel (http://jexcelapi.sourceforge.net/) to write the excel files.
-
CSV might be easier, faster, and less prone to incompatibility errors. :nervous:
I've had good luck with OpenCSV.
-
Cool. XD
I dunno, having "Name" show up reminded me of the days when I used to muck around with Red Alert 2's... rules (their "tables") using an application... and nothing was obvious at first glance. Or was it not Red Alert 2 or some other game... ugh, I can't remember really. :doubt:
Obviously I later got around to editing the text files manually with Wordpad, but in a way that app helped me get a rough idea of what (most) of the text in them rules files meant. IMO FSO is better documented, all the more so with a wiki, but who knows where the next wannabe modder for FSO will start from.
That said, what's the export to spreadsheet for? I have not yet experienced "proper" beta testing and release of a mod so I don't know the usefulness of an export function. (and no i'm not being sarcastic, i honestly don't know.) I've only done one OpenOffice spreadsheet for some weapons, and that one was pretty much manually typed, I'm not well-schooled on office suites anyway (be it MS or OOO).
-
The spreadsheet is useful when you want to balance weapons and/or ship stats so you only have to modify one value and the rest would be calculated. Fury explained it in this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72344.0).
I have also attached a zip containing two exports of the retail ships.tbl in CSV and XLS formats.
[attachment deleted by admin]