[Valius]

Hey there everyone.
I'm starting to (slowly) learn how to create ships in Freespace and I was wondering, what programs do you guys use to edit .tbl files.

[HeX]

Notepad

[CP5670]

Notepad if it can open the file; Wordpad otherwise.

[vadar_1]

[CP5670]

[Ulundel]

Yes wordpad rules!!!

[Stunaep]

Originally posted by Ten of Twelve
Yes wordpad rules!!!

Wordpad nothing, all hail NOTEPAD

[Ulundel]

Originally posted by Stunaep


Wordpad nothing, all hail NOTEPAD

You edit tables with notepad????

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Valius
Hey there everyone.
I'm starting to (slowly) learn how to create ships in Freespace and I was wondering, what programs do you guys use to edit .tbl files.

Notepad (or any text editor).  Just view all files (in the open dialog box) and open a tbl file - it's an ASCII text file, so it can be edited.

Just make sure not to change the save format.

http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/fs1/mods/Guide/WeapMOD.shtml is a useful guide to tbls, although it's FS1 (but most of it applies to FS2)

[Unknown Target]

Originally posted by Stunaep


Wordpad nothing, all hail NOTEPAD

Yes!
Oh, BTW, you need VPVIEW32 from www.descent-network.com

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by CP5670
Green Notepad

Ach! Mein eyes!

[CP5670]

green on black 0\/\/|\|5 _|()0 !!

Notepad would be better than Wordpad if it did not have the 36k filesize limit.

[LAW ENFORCER]

notpad seems not very good when pasting stuff from wordpad. I had to make loads of ships before I could edit properly! (from scratch table!!!!!)

[vadar_1]

Originally posted by CP5670
green on black 0\/\/|\|5 _|()0 !!

Notepad would be better than Wordpad if it did not have the 36k filesize limit.

Um, what? If it was 36k you wouldn't be able to load tables... its more like 6 megs

[Star Dragon]

HI also learning to make my own stuff for FS2. I figured out how to extract the tbl files and then edit them with notepad/wordpad BUT I can't seem to get them back to .tbl format??? It tried to save it as one of 3 different types of txt documents? Is there a program I need to get to make or edit purely .tbl files to save in that format ???

 Also I have a dream of having all the mods in one big game. Robotech,Bab5, ST,SW ect.. is there a physical limit to the number of ships you can have in a table? Do mod ships replace an existing slot in the table or can you keep adding more custom stuff to the original no problem?

Same for weapons or stars???

[Valius]

Ok, managed to edit the tables, but I seem to have another problem. When I add a ship into the table and try to start up a mission using it, the game crashes. Anyway to get around this?

[DTP]

UltraEdit:


Because it has 100+ functions, I recently just created a CLEAN ships.tbl without the comments, and unnecessary tabulator stops, and unnecessary Spaces, which took the size of the TBL file down to about 246 KB. That means I got around 140 KBS of new ship entries. And I did this in 10 min or less.

+ I like to multitask a lot, so I value low resource demanding applications, and Wordpad uses 1% more resource than Ultra edit.

+ I can have multiple documents open at once in Ultra edit, and align them such in a second that I can easily have the original TBL file opened and my modified TBL file opened that I get an excellent view of both documents at any one time.

This program is superb to edit any file that uses raw ASCII text such as C/C++ source files, or HTML, as it highlights functions and keywords and numbers with colors in a way that you can easily see what you are doing, instead of just looking at Black or Green text.

But, it costs money of course.

[Galemp]

Originally posted by DTP
UltraEdit:

But, it costs money of course.

Aye, there's the rub.

[Sesquipedalian]

Originally posted by Star Dragon
HI also learning to make my own stuff for FS2. I figured out how to extract the tbl files and then edit them with notepad/wordpad BUT I can't seem to get them back to .tbl format??? It tried to save it as one of 3 different types of txt documents? Is there a program I need to get to make or edit purely .tbl files to save in that format ???

 Also I have a dream of having all the mods in one big game. Robotech,Bab5, ST,SW ect.. is there a physical limit to the number of ships you can have in a table? Do mod ships replace an existing slot in the table or can you keep adding more custom stuff to the original no problem?

Same for weapons or stars???

The limit for ships.tbl is 380 kB of data, rather than any particular number of entries.  You can reduce the size of your ships.tbl dramatically by following the instructions here.  This will give you lots more space to put more ships into the table.

Unfortunately, one cannot have more than forty fighters listed in the hud.tbl.  This is the table that catalogues all the shield animations for all the fighters (i.e. the pictures on either side of the radar showing the shield strengths of yourself and your target).  So while you could theoretically have all the fighters from all the mods in your ships.tbl at one time, only forty of them could have a shield ani show up on the HUD.

P.S.  Rather than using Save As, simply use Save to keep the .tbl file extension.  Alternatively, save the file as a plain text file (.txt), and then manually change the file extension to .tbl in the Windows shell.

[WMCoolmon]

You could look into PHPEdit; to color things in a more sensible manner, simply add "