[T-Man]

Had an idea today concerning Table files. Basicly i've been secretly having a snap at creating a "frankenstein-style" one made up of cut and pasted ships from other table files just for the sake of trying it.

However, upon opening the file for the first time, i could barely understand it. The programming is all gobuldygook and scattered around everywhere.

It made me think that maybe someone with some programming experience could create a "table editor" program which presented the table writing process as seperate items (such as type-in boxes for "Name" or "Tech description" and tick boxes for special flags like "Player Ship" and "Default player ship"). Meanwhile, the program would transelate that data into a tbl file that FS2 could read off of.

Such a thing would be useful for both modding newcomers and veterans alike. Any ideas?

[kasperl]

tblview exists, it ain't fun, but it is possible.

sandwich made a PHP syntax highlighting thingy.

[Bobboau]

and tables are changeing so fast today I don't think think it would be feasable

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Bobboau
and tables are changeing so fast today I don't think think it would be feasable

Hmmm. If someone did this in the same way that many HTML editors work (i.e you can edit using tickboxes etc or by directly editing the table itself) then it might work.

New stuff is added all the time but stuff isn't taken out very often so worst case senario is that this would just get outdated fast.

[Liberator]

I've been thinking about doing one for a while, just never had the gumption to design or work on it.

[WMCoolmon]

I made a ships table viewer with C++, which could also (with some...well, probably quite a bit of work) become an editor.

I'll see if I can dig it up.

Linkie

[JC Denton]

Is it even remotely possible for there to be a TBL editor that can reference the Tbl info in the fs2_open executable?  This way the editor could just pull the data on all the possible fields from the exe, and you'd never need to update it with respect to tbl functions and whatnot.

[WMCoolmon]

It turns out I did some more work on the test_shiplib after I uploaded it. I don't have a place to upload it though, because I used all the webspace on my account...

You could do something like what you're saying with the source, as long as you didn't want too advanced of a GUI. You could read the type of data and field names (string, number, fraction) from the source, but not much else beyond that.

It really wouldn't be worth the effort, IMHO. It wouldn't be possible to do it with just the executable either.

BUT I did something somewhat like that, in that I linked to the fs2_open code with my program so if a data structure is updated in the source, it'll be updated whenever the program is rebuilt as well. The program still has to be updated by hand when new fields are added, but only to convert them to the right format and to have a place to show them.

Apologies if that's confusing, it's an odd mix of coding terms and not-quite-layman's terms.

[mikhael]

You know, I remember this was suggested a while back and basically everyone raped the guy.

Bob: intelligent parsing of the table and realtime form creation would take care of the 'table format changes too fast' problem.

[Arculis]

I think it'd be great, regardless of what everyone else says. And I don't care if "the tables change too fast", because I still use the original Freespace 2

(FS2 Open makes me paranoid that they'll raise the system requirements. FS2 barely runs on my computer as is. Raising the requirements any means it won't be playable at all. No HTL for me.)

One option though would be to make the program itself easily customizable. Maybe you could just have a text file that gets parsed when the program is executed, much like the tables themselves. The textfile would determine what entries there are to edit, where they're located on the screen (assuming its arranged kinda like this), which options you have (YES, NO, etc...) and anything else that's needed. That way, if the tables get updated, people can update the editor themselves.

[Trivial Psychic]

I've always thought that such a program would be a serious asset to campaign construction, as long as the user is given the ability to tell the program to ignore certain manual table entries that the program may not be aware of, such as when new features are added to FS2.  It might also be useful if said program was equipped to edit/construct weapons table files as well, since these 2 are the most commonly edited table files.

Later!

[Arculis]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
It might also be useful if said program was equipped to edit/construct weapons table files as well, since these 2 are the most commonly edited table files.

That would be another benefit to making the program customizable.

[WMCoolmon]

How do people like this program?

You can only make changes to the overview tab (and you can't actually save to a table file) but of course such things can be implemented with time and effort.

Edit: Oops, link fixed.

[Trivial Psychic]

The above link needs the "~" to be removed for it to work properly.

[Silent Warrior]

I don't think a new tbl-editor is much needed. Still, if you push out an editor that beats Notepad, I'm impressed.



Hey, there's nuthin' ya can't do ta FS2 wit Notepad!

[ChronoReverse]

TRue, but Textpad is superior to Notepad in every way