A few easy feature requests
BeigeAlert
Texas Join Date: 2013-08-08 Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
Texas Join Date: 2013-08-08 Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
in Mapping
Hey! New mapper here, working on his first map. However, I've found a few basic features lacking in the Spark editor.
-Box Selection - Works great! Unless you don't want stuff on the other side of a wall getting wiped out too! Rough experience... Had already spent several hours on one part of a level, and was working on the next part. Well imagine my horror when, after a few more hours of work, I looked back to find pretty much ALL of the first room I'd made earlier has been wiped out and discombobulated beyond recognition. Yessir, I had been foolishly using the box selection assuming I was only affecting things I could actually SEE. And not realizing something was wrong until MUCH MUCH later, I had already made many saves and there was no way the undo stack was THAT deep... well and truly screwed I was! Well after I stopped bawling my eyes out about 12 hours later, I sucked it up and started over again.
-Curves! Yes yes we all know curves are a kick in the balls to deal with in Spark, so I'll throw my vote in there for better tools, especially when it comes to texturing the darned things! One thing I'd like in particular is a way to easily select an edge loop. HOLD ON HOLD ON! I'm not talking about the erm... "edge loop" selection that you get by double clicking an edge... that's pretty much just selecting the edges of a face... that's next to useless! No, I'm talking about selecting a bunch of edges in a line. For instance, if I have a long curved rail, as it is now if I wanted to make the edges smooth, I'd have to go through and select every edge, one-by-one, pressing S. That's a lot of time wasted! What would be more useful would be if it went through and selected all the edges that were in a line Just google image search "edge loop selection" to see what I'm talking about.
-A way to "dissolve" vertices. Say you have a rectangle... a 5 sided rectangle... oh wait that won't do! It's a four-sided shape, but there's a pesky fifth vertex free-loading on one of the four edges! (well five I guess....). It would be GREAT to be able to be able to select that ONE vertex and click "dissolve" which would remove the vertex, but keep the face intact... even if that means the face has to deform a little bit because it no longer has 5 sides (in this example, it wouldn't).
-Same as above, but with edges.
-A little feedback!!!!!! If I draw a rectangle and a face ISN'T created... I'd kinda like to know WHY! I'm sick to death of playing hide and seek with Mr. Double-edge.
-Box Selection Subtraction - I'm really not a fan of the way it works now. Correct me if I'm wrong but here's my impression: If ctrl isn't held, make a new selection. If ctrl is held: and something boxed is already selected, deselect EVERYTHING in the box, otherwise add it to the selection. What if I want to add to the selection, but don't quite have a surgeon's precision in selecting ONLY things that aren't already selected?
Anyways, these are minor grievances really... Fantastic job building all this from scratch! Also, thanks for reading... I hope these suggestions are found useful.
-Box Selection - Works great! Unless you don't want stuff on the other side of a wall getting wiped out too! Rough experience... Had already spent several hours on one part of a level, and was working on the next part. Well imagine my horror when, after a few more hours of work, I looked back to find pretty much ALL of the first room I'd made earlier has been wiped out and discombobulated beyond recognition. Yessir, I had been foolishly using the box selection assuming I was only affecting things I could actually SEE. And not realizing something was wrong until MUCH MUCH later, I had already made many saves and there was no way the undo stack was THAT deep... well and truly screwed I was! Well after I stopped bawling my eyes out about 12 hours later, I sucked it up and started over again.
-Curves! Yes yes we all know curves are a kick in the balls to deal with in Spark, so I'll throw my vote in there for better tools, especially when it comes to texturing the darned things! One thing I'd like in particular is a way to easily select an edge loop. HOLD ON HOLD ON! I'm not talking about the erm... "edge loop" selection that you get by double clicking an edge... that's pretty much just selecting the edges of a face... that's next to useless! No, I'm talking about selecting a bunch of edges in a line. For instance, if I have a long curved rail, as it is now if I wanted to make the edges smooth, I'd have to go through and select every edge, one-by-one, pressing S. That's a lot of time wasted! What would be more useful would be if it went through and selected all the edges that were in a line Just google image search "edge loop selection" to see what I'm talking about.
-A way to "dissolve" vertices. Say you have a rectangle... a 5 sided rectangle... oh wait that won't do! It's a four-sided shape, but there's a pesky fifth vertex free-loading on one of the four edges! (well five I guess....). It would be GREAT to be able to be able to select that ONE vertex and click "dissolve" which would remove the vertex, but keep the face intact... even if that means the face has to deform a little bit because it no longer has 5 sides (in this example, it wouldn't).
-Same as above, but with edges.
-A little feedback!!!!!! If I draw a rectangle and a face ISN'T created... I'd kinda like to know WHY! I'm sick to death of playing hide and seek with Mr. Double-edge.
-Box Selection Subtraction - I'm really not a fan of the way it works now. Correct me if I'm wrong but here's my impression: If ctrl isn't held, make a new selection. If ctrl is held: and something boxed is already selected, deselect EVERYTHING in the box, otherwise add it to the selection. What if I want to add to the selection, but don't quite have a surgeon's precision in selecting ONLY things that aren't already selected?
Anyways, these are minor grievances really... Fantastic job building all this from scratch! Also, thanks for reading... I hope these suggestions are found useful.
Comments
I'm so lonely!
Need to be able to snap points to faces and lines.
Need to be able to create arcs better.
Be able to know why a face wasn't created (even though it is usually because of 2 unwelded points.
Vertices to edge - select two vertices and put an edge between them. Line tool is great for this... except when they're VERY close BUT not on-axis. The line tool is INSISTENT upon snapping to an axis (even when grid snap is off), so sometimes if I'm not looking closely, I can accidentally make an edge that isn't connecting two vertices, but LOOKS like it is, then later wonder why it won't create a face.
Extrude edge w/ direction: Extruding edges is great, but what if I want to move it in a direction other than the coplanar of what the face it's attached to now is? Say I have a flat rectangle on the floor, and I want to extrude sides of it upwards to make walls. I have to extrude it the way it wants to go... move it back... THEN pull it upwards... and I can really only do that if I'm working on the axes... what if it's a weird angle? Can't easily move it back because of the funky grid snap. I know I could simply extrude the whole face upwards and flip the edges, but that doesn't work for all situations... (what if all the other walls are already up?)
Multiple extrude - say I want to extrude a bunch of surfaces the same amount, all at once... well you can't right now.
Extrude with inset & bevel - This is more of a "want" than a "need". We can get by fine without this, but it would make detail work a LOT faster. I would love to be able to extrude a face inwards to make a window box, while at the same time it is beveling the edges and insetting the face so it looks nicer.
Use normal angle for moving a face in "local space" - right now, selecting a face and moving it, your only option is "global space". "Local space" is there, but it doesn't do anything. It'd be great to move a face along it's local axes (esp with z axis being the normal line). This would greatly complement working with non-90 degree angles... So if you want to move a face angled at say... 27 degrees or something strange like that, you don't have to worry about the rest of your hallway getting distorted because of it moving the edges. Yea you can get the same results in a few extra steps by just extruding, then deleting the edges left behind by the extrusion... but that's a lot of extra steps... and that's if you get lucky and it doesn't decide to start randomly deleting faces when you delete an edge between two coplanar faces.
SUPER EASY way to reproduce this:
-Open the editor
-Draw a rectangle on the floor
-Extrude down to make a room.
-Delete two opposite walls of the room.
-Position the camera so you can see both the missing walls at the same time, while still being lower than the ceiling, higher than the floor, and between the two walls you deleted (though you can back out of the room.)
-WITHOUT MOVING THE CAMERA, create two new walls to replace the ones you deleted. One is backwards!
Again, not a huge big editor-breaking bug, but an annoyance nonetheless.
Anyways, another feature we need to make mapping easier is a quick way to split up faces for trim textures. Right now, you have to use the line tool, which works great as long as your edge is running parallel to a major axis. But if you're working on a differently angled hallway, you pretty much just have to eyeball it to see if you got the thickness right. Yea I know there's that weird grid reorienting thing where the grid will try to orient itself to the face, but this isn't reliable at all, and sometimes just doesn't work.
Even in the top view, that's still just eyeballing it.
The midpoint snapping!!!!!!! PLEASE let us turn it off!!! When I'm trying to keep things nice and neat on the grid with the line or rectangle tool, I don't want to have to be fighting (and losing!) to the sometimes-useful midpoint snapping feature. Right now for example, I'm trying to etch a rectangle onto a wall in the precise 96x48 size that vent entrances are... but I can't get the height right because the silly midpoint snapping is forcing me to go either 96x40 or 96x64. Yes I can certainly work around it in this instance, by drawing the rectangle further up and moving it down, but I don't always have that luxury... like when working with odd angles and you can't just move it back into place because the grid snap is working against you.
Close, but weld vertices will move both vertices. It's difficult to get rid of an extra vertice on an edge without moving the other vertices. You have to take the one you want to get rid of, and move it exactly over another vertice, and then do "weld near". If the other vertice isn't aligned to the grid (say on a curve or something), then your only option is to delete the extra vertice... which unfortunately wipes out the whole face which you then have to manually draw back in. What I was suggesting was a way to KEEP the polygon after deleting the vertice. Now of course this wouldn't work if a polygon only had 3 vertices to start with, but it would save me a LOT of time if, I notice a lot of redundant vertices on a face, I can easily select them and just click "dissolve vertice". It turns a potential 2-3 step process into one click.
THAT would come in handy.