[JGZinv]

I believe this was brought up about 2-3 years ago, however I can't find that thread after significant searching.

Currently in order to see the changes made to assets in game we have to go "the long way" of shutting down
FSO, doing our tweaks, and reloading FSO and the mission, or at least the lab. Rinse and repeat for every little
change.


What I'd like to suggest is two things:

A. A manual update button for the lab, so that the current asset being displayed will be reloaded / refreshed.

B. A method by which we can use a shortcut or set a launcher flag, and launch FSO and go directly to the lab - or launch a mission file, dictated by the settings of the "shortcut."
Essentially a quickload feature.


I'd be more than happy with A, but B came to mind as well to streamline things.

Item A. is kinda/sorta handled by PCS2 and whatever modeling setup you're using, but it doesn't cover everything. You can't as easily just tweak a glow or see how your
launcher settings affect the appearance of a texture. If I'm working on a handful of things, I'm probably reloading FSO a couple hundred times a day. It'd be great to just cut
out a lot of that with a refresh button for the Lab.  Trying to reload all the assets in an active mission I can imagine would be an entirely different can of worms, plus you mostly
need FRED for that anyway. So the Lab would suffice for most issues related to asset tweaking. Ideally you'd be able to have Photoshop or PCS2 open in one window, FSO stay open
in another, and be able to tweak/save/update and see your changes within a couple seconds.


Item B. I recall back in the old thread someone said the only option at that time was to setup a red alert mission, but I wonder if we may not have better options now?

[assasing123]

This would be pretty damn usefull, if it could be made such that it reloaded the tables on request, specific tables, it would be pretty damn usefull, for example lets say i tweak a weaopn range or speed, i have to reload all the client again just to see if it works as intended, would be nice if i could tell the client to reload lets say weapons-tbm files or ship tbm files.

[JGZinv]

There you're getting back into weapons though, meaning in mission differences.
You're not talking about the Lab as I am, you're wanting to update stuff from within a mission.

I don't disagree that it could be useful, but it is two different things we're seeking here.
Item B would possibly be useful to you though in this context.

[assasing123]

There you're getting back into weapons though, meaning in mission differences.
You're not talking about the Lab as I am, you're wanting to update stuff from within a mission.

I don't disagree that it could be useful, but it is two different things we're seeking here.

well you want to notice visual changes, i want to notice functional changes. we both seek the same function, but for different goals.

[Nuke]

hell if you implement a then you can have something along the lines of an in-game pof editor, scripted of course (im actually rather surprised that nobody has made any script based in-game mod tools).

but i seriously doubt that a would be implemented.

[LordMelvin]

As for b, didn't I see karajorma in the thread on doing an in-game graphics settings menu say that there's already the ability in the engine to go directly to a specific mission instead of the mainhall? Or was I being overenthusiastic and misinterpreting?

[Nuke]

it works but its slow because you have to load the mission. this is actually only of the earliest examples for things to use scripting for.

[JGZinv]

Well I mean we already use a mission as mainhall menu, the script for that has been around for quite some time.
The delay when you "have" to load the mission is a given, and really I'm not worried about that part. It's the age old
thing of clicking 10-15 times through all the menus when you just want to back to the same mission with the default settings
to check your edits.


Why does A sound so difficult Nuke?  We're asking for the game to refresh it's working copies of all files in the effects, models, maps, and
tables folders essentially correct? - Because we can't simply update from one entry out of a table file right?

[Nuke]

not to say i dont want it (id love to see in-game pof, table, and, eventually, material editors, so that we can see things as they will be rather than what they should look like) but it seems like an extreme change to make to the engine. changing tables on the fly is likely out of the question (some systems once inited with certain paramaters would need to be shut down and re-inited, and if another system in the engine depends on that system, then that too must be re-inited), bitmaps would be the easiest to do, and models somewhere in between. of course i only understand how things work in less than 2% of the engine, so im not the final word on what can and cannot be done. big problem is finding coders who want to implement it. it wont do anything for performance and its not as glamorous as graphics or gameplay features.

[Goober5000]

Yeah, this has been brought up many times before and the response is always the same.  I'm going to lock this to prevent people from getting their hopes up.

It would be useful to have a way to modify individual ship parameters, such as speed, rotation damp, and so forth.  There's no inherent conflict in doing that in the lab.  But reloading the entire ships.tbl (as well as almost any other table) involves so much de-initialization and re-initialization that it is practically equivalent to shutting down and relaunching the entire game.  Not to mention that you would have to disrupt what is currently a predictable loading order and rewrite the code to allow a thing to be bootstrapped into the middle of almost any loading order you can think of.  No thank you.