Editor feature request thread!
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
I couldn't help but notice on the CDT Trello that there are a few "tools" improvements.
I'd like to suggest a few features for the editor that I think would be very easy to implement, and I'm sure everyone else here has something to say. Try to be specific as to what the feature is, why it would be useful, and especially how it would work from a user-interface standpoint. If it's a tricky(er) problem, try to provide a suggestion for how it would actually work from an algorithm standpoint (see "align to longest edge", below). Everyone is shouting "better texture tools", but I haven't seen a whole lot of concrete suggestions for what that should actually look like.
Additional Texture Buttons (ie "Fit", "Center", etc...)
-"Rotate 90 CW", "Rotate 90 CCW", "Rotate 180", "Flip X", "Flip Y". Sure, I can easily punch in the number for each texture, but what if I've got a whole bunch of faces selected, like for a curved trim? What if I have already painstakingly aligned the texture coordinates for one type of trim, but later decide I like a different trim that is oriented differently in the texture? Say I've got a horizontal trim texture applied to several faces, it'd be nice if I could quickly rotate the texture around so that I could assign a vertical trim texture to it. Note that this would not only involve adding 90/-90 to the rotation value of each face, but you'd also need to swap the scale x and scale y values so that the texture isn't suddenly really pinched or really stretched.
-"Align to longest edge". This would really only be used for flat surfaces, like curved trim on the ground. Normally, we have to go through and rotate all the trim by hand, or do some crafty trick where you raise up one side, lock texture coordinates, and lower it again, but that's still very time consuming. What this function would do is set the texture's rotation to the orientation of the longest edge. This would work hand in hand with the above functions for fine tuning the texture (ie what if I want the trim oriented along the short side? Well, hit the rotate 90 button!)
Interface
-Select face loop. Some key combination would be used (ie ctrl + shift) on an edge, which would select the two QUADS (this would only work with quads, no triangles or ngons) that that edge shares, and then would keep iterating through each face, selecting the opposite face, until it either terminates or reaches a non 4-sided face. I feel like 90% of my time in spark is spent selecting lots of little faces that could be easily selected automatically with a simple algorithm.
-Textures on/off (toggle between dev textures on everything, and the actual textures for each face).
-Show light icons (pain in the ass to put all lights on a layer and hide them. Would be nice to be able to just turn off the icon). Also, show/hide cinematics icon model (so I can see the damned cinematic without that orange thing in the way! You can hide the layer it's on, but that stops it from animating)
-Allow the scale tool to scale to 0% ie so you can flatten non-planar faces. At the moment what it does if you scale to 0% is it sort of pretends it's actually 100% and just centers it. This is just bizarre and completely counter-intuitive. One thing though, if you change how the scale tool works, PLEASE RETAIN the behavior where if you scale to what would normally be a negative value (ie grab the handle on one side, move it all the way past 0 to the other side), the selection is merely transformed, rather than flipped. I actually use this little hack quite a lot.
-Ability to change the line-tool's on-polygon grid between local coordinates, and global coordinates... what the hell does that mean Beige? Go into the editor, and make a circle, right now. Now try to draw a square inside of it. Well... yea that's a square, but it's rotated all funny! This is just frustrating and it would be nice if we could set the orientation of that otherwise very-helpful grid that appears when using the line or rectangle tools on a face.
-"Drill" option. Say I've got a flat rectangle and I draw a closed shape inside of it. It connects up and now I can extrude the shape out or do whatever I want, and it's awesome that we can have faces with holes in them. What's not awesome is that it's a baffling ordeal to duplicate that shape, and create a second hole in the same face. The only way to do that now is to: 1) Select all the edges in the loop, and duplicate that over. 2) Draw a pair of temporary vertical and horizontal lines from any vertex, to mark the position. 3) Delete that vertex, then re-make that vertex using the horizontal and vertical lines to get the position right back where it was (if needed... sometimes it's already on-grid and the two helper lines are unnecessary). 4) Re-draw the edges, and the hole is "drilled" into the face like new. 5) Delete any helper lines you created (obviously). TLDR: it would be nice if, given a PLANAR surface, and an equi-planar (is that a word?) edge loop, by clicking the "drill face" button, you would etch a new face into the polygon in the shape of the selected edge loop.
-"Rip faces" - say I want to separate a selection of faces from the rest of an object. The process now is to select the faces, ctrl+x, and ctrl+v. This works well except that it removes faces from any layers and groups they might have been a part of, as well as potentially leaving behind a LOT of garbage vertices and edges, as ctrl+X on a face alone will leave its associated edges and vertices behind, even if they are no longer connected to any faces. A "rip faces" feature would simply detach the selected faces from any surrounding, un-selected faces. So we don't create any new faces, but this tool will have to duplicate any vertices and edges shared between selected and non-selected faces.
-"Convert Selection To..." and "Add to Selection" - This is for geometry only. Say you've got a face selected. You could choose "Convert Selection To -> Vertices..." and this would select the face's vertices. "Add to selection" would work the same, the difference being if the selection is cumulative or not (ie "convert" deselects first, then selects what was requested, whereas "add" would keep the old selection). It would also work with Edges, and faces as well. I picture this being laid out like so: You have a new "Selection" dropdown menu. Inside that, you'll find "Convert Selection To..." and "Add to Selection". Inside both of these menus, you will find "Vertices", "Edges...", and "Faces...". "Vertices" simply selects all the member vertices of any selected edges and/or faces. "Edges..." will contain five options: "vertex pairs", "face borders", "outer borders", "inner borders" and "shared edges". "vertex pairs" simply selects any edges that have both their vertices already selected. "face borders" selects every edge loop associated with a face. "outer borders" selects only the outer-most border of a face (so loops drilled into faces won't be selected by this). "inner borders" selects the edges that form the "islands" inside the faces. Finally "shared edges" will select the edges that two or more faces share (so if two selected faces are touching, the edge between them is selected). Inside the "Faces..." menu, there will be 4 options: "whole faces", "partial faces", "inner faces", and "parent face". "Whole faces" selects any faces that have all of their edges, vertices, or both selected (so a 4 sided face has to either have all 4 edges, all 4 vertices, or both selected to complete the selection). "partial faces" selects any faces that share a member with the current selection (so a 4 sided face will be selected if even 1 of its edges or vertices is selected). "inner faces" will select the inner faces of a face, if it has any. "Parent face" will attempt to find the face the selection is contained within, and select it.
-When using the "move" tool, it would be extremely useful to, in addition to the coordinates it already spits out, print out the deltas as well. So if we have a specific move in mind, ie 80 units in the -z direction, we could dial that in exactly. Yea, we can count it out as-is, but if you're moving a LOT of stuff (right now I'm trying to reposition a whole room -- one that is detailed and consists of thousands of vertices/edges/faces, hundreds of props, and many many lights and other entities. It updates the position while moving so slowly that I can't tell if I've just moved 8 units... or 16 or 24!
Bug-fixes
-It would be nice if the textures better-stuck to the faces during texture-locked transformations. Right now, it does a decent enough job of getting it close, but sometimes that just doesn't cut it, like with complex trim. I keep finding areas where the trim has mysteriously become mis-aligned, when I KNOW I lined it up properly.
-Using the "flip" commands will really screw up your texturing (most-every texture at an angle will need to be *=-1 and re-aligned.)
-The long-standing ctrl+alt+right click bug.
-Illumination on materials being slightly dependent on how big the polygon is (yea wtf?). Not an editor bug, but I figured I'd put it here anyways. I discovered this a long time ago, and went on a bit of a rant. Here's the post that includes a GIF illustrating a problem: http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2191087/#Comment_2191087
-Faces with inner-loops do not divide properly into non-inner-loop faces. Super easy repro: 1) Draw a rectangle. 2) Draw a rectangle inside the first rectangle. There should now be two faces: a rectangle, and a border around the rectangle. 3) take the line tool and draw a line from one of the corners of the first rectangle to the nearest corner of the inner rectangle. It's still two faces, but with a line through one of the corners. 4) repeat step 3 with a different corner now. In an idea world, you would now have 3 faces: the same inner rectangle, a "U" shaped face around the perimeter, and a trapezoid shaped face on one of the sides. BUT, this is not the case. What has happened is you have the inner rectangle, the trapezoid face... as well as the original border face -- it hasn't been divided like it should have! Now, this isn't such a big deal for this example, it's only a few clicks to rebuild the face... but there are many situations where this is far from ideal. There are some walls in my map that have many many edges in the complete loop, and to rebuild that takes a few minutes at a time. It's a real workflow killer.
-Extruding adjacent faces can bug out and create a big super face. I believe this is a symptom of Spark REALLY over-thinking things when extruding faces. Let me demonstrate: 1) Draw a rectangle. Dimensions don't matter, but I'll throw some down here anyways: 128x128. This is rectangle #1. 2) Extrude the west edge of rectangle #1 128 units. This makes rectangle #2. 3) Extrude the south edge of rectangle #2 128 units. This makes rectangle #3. 4) Extrude the south edge of rectangle #3 128 units, this makes rectangle #4. 5) Extrude the east edge of rectangle #4 128 units. This makes rectangle #5. You should now see a sideways "U" shape. 6) Extrude the east edge of rectangle #3 128 units. You should now have a 3-row, 2-column grid of faces... but what's this? The last face created is a SUPER face! And by "super", I of course mean "useless garbage that must be deleted and re-created by hand". This bug happens to me quite frequently. It seems to me the problem is just some faulty logic in spark that's trying to be "helpful" by creating the face using existing edges... doesn't seem to be working right, if that's the case, and even if it did work right, I'd prefer it create the new edges instead.
Misc
-"NoLoad" layer. Anything in this layer will not be loaded by the game, overview, or included in a .cinematic. The purpose of this layer would be for things you don't want in the game, but don't want to delete either. For example, It's extremely useful to have a 1024 radius circle as an arc range, but if you leave it where it is most useful in the editor, you'll have these massive circles on the minimap. Sure, you can just move them, but then you have to move them back every time you want to check the range. Yea, you can move them way down and add them to "CommanderInvisible" but they'll still show up in spec mode, and that just seems sloppy.
-"ShadowCatcher" layer. Anything in this layer will not render primary visibility, but will still affect the shadow casting/shapes. I assume this would be an easy fix because CommanderInvisible stuff already does this, just for players in the chair. The best example of where this would be useful is on a map like docking. Look around the cafeteria and courtyard area. There are lots of big rectangles between the walls that are only there to prevent spotlight shadows from leaking through.
-"OnlyLayer" option for lights. Lights will only illuminate objects on the same layer they're on. I know I'm pushing my luck with this one, but it would make lighting outdoor areas MUCH MUCH easier. As it is now, it's insanely difficult to light an area outdoors, without a ton of light leaking through the walls into other parts of the map. Best example I can think of is Temple. I've got a MASSIVE cliff outside, and I really don't have a clue how I'm going to light that thing... short of writing my own shaders that ignore lighting altogether. Anyways, it'd be nice if there was an option to make a light only illuminate a layer. Not sure how difficult this would be to implement, but I'm throwing it out there anyways.
-"Update Shadow Maps" menu item. Sometimes, spot lights don't update their shadow maps, so you gotta wiggle them.
I'd like to suggest a few features for the editor that I think would be very easy to implement, and I'm sure everyone else here has something to say. Try to be specific as to what the feature is, why it would be useful, and especially how it would work from a user-interface standpoint. If it's a tricky(er) problem, try to provide a suggestion for how it would actually work from an algorithm standpoint (see "align to longest edge", below). Everyone is shouting "better texture tools", but I haven't seen a whole lot of concrete suggestions for what that should actually look like.
Additional Texture Buttons (ie "Fit", "Center", etc...)
-"Rotate 90 CW", "Rotate 90 CCW", "Rotate 180", "Flip X", "Flip Y". Sure, I can easily punch in the number for each texture, but what if I've got a whole bunch of faces selected, like for a curved trim? What if I have already painstakingly aligned the texture coordinates for one type of trim, but later decide I like a different trim that is oriented differently in the texture? Say I've got a horizontal trim texture applied to several faces, it'd be nice if I could quickly rotate the texture around so that I could assign a vertical trim texture to it. Note that this would not only involve adding 90/-90 to the rotation value of each face, but you'd also need to swap the scale x and scale y values so that the texture isn't suddenly really pinched or really stretched.
-"Align to longest edge". This would really only be used for flat surfaces, like curved trim on the ground. Normally, we have to go through and rotate all the trim by hand, or do some crafty trick where you raise up one side, lock texture coordinates, and lower it again, but that's still very time consuming. What this function would do is set the texture's rotation to the orientation of the longest edge. This would work hand in hand with the above functions for fine tuning the texture (ie what if I want the trim oriented along the short side? Well, hit the rotate 90 button!)
Interface
-Select face loop. Some key combination would be used (ie ctrl + shift) on an edge, which would select the two QUADS (this would only work with quads, no triangles or ngons) that that edge shares, and then would keep iterating through each face, selecting the opposite face, until it either terminates or reaches a non 4-sided face. I feel like 90% of my time in spark is spent selecting lots of little faces that could be easily selected automatically with a simple algorithm.
-Textures on/off (toggle between dev textures on everything, and the actual textures for each face).
-Show light icons (pain in the ass to put all lights on a layer and hide them. Would be nice to be able to just turn off the icon). Also, show/hide cinematics icon model (so I can see the damned cinematic without that orange thing in the way! You can hide the layer it's on, but that stops it from animating)
-Allow the scale tool to scale to 0% ie so you can flatten non-planar faces. At the moment what it does if you scale to 0% is it sort of pretends it's actually 100% and just centers it. This is just bizarre and completely counter-intuitive. One thing though, if you change how the scale tool works, PLEASE RETAIN the behavior where if you scale to what would normally be a negative value (ie grab the handle on one side, move it all the way past 0 to the other side), the selection is merely transformed, rather than flipped. I actually use this little hack quite a lot.
-Ability to change the line-tool's on-polygon grid between local coordinates, and global coordinates... what the hell does that mean Beige? Go into the editor, and make a circle, right now. Now try to draw a square inside of it. Well... yea that's a square, but it's rotated all funny! This is just frustrating and it would be nice if we could set the orientation of that otherwise very-helpful grid that appears when using the line or rectangle tools on a face.
-"Drill" option. Say I've got a flat rectangle and I draw a closed shape inside of it. It connects up and now I can extrude the shape out or do whatever I want, and it's awesome that we can have faces with holes in them. What's not awesome is that it's a baffling ordeal to duplicate that shape, and create a second hole in the same face. The only way to do that now is to: 1) Select all the edges in the loop, and duplicate that over. 2) Draw a pair of temporary vertical and horizontal lines from any vertex, to mark the position. 3) Delete that vertex, then re-make that vertex using the horizontal and vertical lines to get the position right back where it was (if needed... sometimes it's already on-grid and the two helper lines are unnecessary). 4) Re-draw the edges, and the hole is "drilled" into the face like new. 5) Delete any helper lines you created (obviously). TLDR: it would be nice if, given a PLANAR surface, and an equi-planar (is that a word?) edge loop, by clicking the "drill face" button, you would etch a new face into the polygon in the shape of the selected edge loop.
-"Rip faces" - say I want to separate a selection of faces from the rest of an object. The process now is to select the faces, ctrl+x, and ctrl+v. This works well except that it removes faces from any layers and groups they might have been a part of, as well as potentially leaving behind a LOT of garbage vertices and edges, as ctrl+X on a face alone will leave its associated edges and vertices behind, even if they are no longer connected to any faces. A "rip faces" feature would simply detach the selected faces from any surrounding, un-selected faces. So we don't create any new faces, but this tool will have to duplicate any vertices and edges shared between selected and non-selected faces.
-"Convert Selection To..." and "Add to Selection" - This is for geometry only. Say you've got a face selected. You could choose "Convert Selection To -> Vertices..." and this would select the face's vertices. "Add to selection" would work the same, the difference being if the selection is cumulative or not (ie "convert" deselects first, then selects what was requested, whereas "add" would keep the old selection). It would also work with Edges, and faces as well. I picture this being laid out like so: You have a new "Selection" dropdown menu. Inside that, you'll find "Convert Selection To..." and "Add to Selection". Inside both of these menus, you will find "Vertices", "Edges...", and "Faces...". "Vertices" simply selects all the member vertices of any selected edges and/or faces. "Edges..." will contain five options: "vertex pairs", "face borders", "outer borders", "inner borders" and "shared edges". "vertex pairs" simply selects any edges that have both their vertices already selected. "face borders" selects every edge loop associated with a face. "outer borders" selects only the outer-most border of a face (so loops drilled into faces won't be selected by this). "inner borders" selects the edges that form the "islands" inside the faces. Finally "shared edges" will select the edges that two or more faces share (so if two selected faces are touching, the edge between them is selected). Inside the "Faces..." menu, there will be 4 options: "whole faces", "partial faces", "inner faces", and "parent face". "Whole faces" selects any faces that have all of their edges, vertices, or both selected (so a 4 sided face has to either have all 4 edges, all 4 vertices, or both selected to complete the selection). "partial faces" selects any faces that share a member with the current selection (so a 4 sided face will be selected if even 1 of its edges or vertices is selected). "inner faces" will select the inner faces of a face, if it has any. "Parent face" will attempt to find the face the selection is contained within, and select it.
-When using the "move" tool, it would be extremely useful to, in addition to the coordinates it already spits out, print out the deltas as well. So if we have a specific move in mind, ie 80 units in the -z direction, we could dial that in exactly. Yea, we can count it out as-is, but if you're moving a LOT of stuff (right now I'm trying to reposition a whole room -- one that is detailed and consists of thousands of vertices/edges/faces, hundreds of props, and many many lights and other entities. It updates the position while moving so slowly that I can't tell if I've just moved 8 units... or 16 or 24!
Bug-fixes
-It would be nice if the textures better-stuck to the faces during texture-locked transformations. Right now, it does a decent enough job of getting it close, but sometimes that just doesn't cut it, like with complex trim. I keep finding areas where the trim has mysteriously become mis-aligned, when I KNOW I lined it up properly.
-Using the "flip" commands will really screw up your texturing (most-every texture at an angle will need to be *=-1 and re-aligned.)
-The long-standing ctrl+alt+right click bug.
-Illumination on materials being slightly dependent on how big the polygon is (yea wtf?). Not an editor bug, but I figured I'd put it here anyways. I discovered this a long time ago, and went on a bit of a rant. Here's the post that includes a GIF illustrating a problem: http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2191087/#Comment_2191087
-Faces with inner-loops do not divide properly into non-inner-loop faces. Super easy repro: 1) Draw a rectangle. 2) Draw a rectangle inside the first rectangle. There should now be two faces: a rectangle, and a border around the rectangle. 3) take the line tool and draw a line from one of the corners of the first rectangle to the nearest corner of the inner rectangle. It's still two faces, but with a line through one of the corners. 4) repeat step 3 with a different corner now. In an idea world, you would now have 3 faces: the same inner rectangle, a "U" shaped face around the perimeter, and a trapezoid shaped face on one of the sides. BUT, this is not the case. What has happened is you have the inner rectangle, the trapezoid face... as well as the original border face -- it hasn't been divided like it should have! Now, this isn't such a big deal for this example, it's only a few clicks to rebuild the face... but there are many situations where this is far from ideal. There are some walls in my map that have many many edges in the complete loop, and to rebuild that takes a few minutes at a time. It's a real workflow killer.
-Extruding adjacent faces can bug out and create a big super face. I believe this is a symptom of Spark REALLY over-thinking things when extruding faces. Let me demonstrate: 1) Draw a rectangle. Dimensions don't matter, but I'll throw some down here anyways: 128x128. This is rectangle #1. 2) Extrude the west edge of rectangle #1 128 units. This makes rectangle #2. 3) Extrude the south edge of rectangle #2 128 units. This makes rectangle #3. 4) Extrude the south edge of rectangle #3 128 units, this makes rectangle #4. 5) Extrude the east edge of rectangle #4 128 units. This makes rectangle #5. You should now see a sideways "U" shape. 6) Extrude the east edge of rectangle #3 128 units. You should now have a 3-row, 2-column grid of faces... but what's this? The last face created is a SUPER face! And by "super", I of course mean "useless garbage that must be deleted and re-created by hand". This bug happens to me quite frequently. It seems to me the problem is just some faulty logic in spark that's trying to be "helpful" by creating the face using existing edges... doesn't seem to be working right, if that's the case, and even if it did work right, I'd prefer it create the new edges instead.
Misc
-"NoLoad" layer. Anything in this layer will not be loaded by the game, overview, or included in a .cinematic. The purpose of this layer would be for things you don't want in the game, but don't want to delete either. For example, It's extremely useful to have a 1024 radius circle as an arc range, but if you leave it where it is most useful in the editor, you'll have these massive circles on the minimap. Sure, you can just move them, but then you have to move them back every time you want to check the range. Yea, you can move them way down and add them to "CommanderInvisible" but they'll still show up in spec mode, and that just seems sloppy.
-"ShadowCatcher" layer. Anything in this layer will not render primary visibility, but will still affect the shadow casting/shapes. I assume this would be an easy fix because CommanderInvisible stuff already does this, just for players in the chair. The best example of where this would be useful is on a map like docking. Look around the cafeteria and courtyard area. There are lots of big rectangles between the walls that are only there to prevent spotlight shadows from leaking through.
-"OnlyLayer" option for lights. Lights will only illuminate objects on the same layer they're on. I know I'm pushing my luck with this one, but it would make lighting outdoor areas MUCH MUCH easier. As it is now, it's insanely difficult to light an area outdoors, without a ton of light leaking through the walls into other parts of the map. Best example I can think of is Temple. I've got a MASSIVE cliff outside, and I really don't have a clue how I'm going to light that thing... short of writing my own shaders that ignore lighting altogether. Anyways, it'd be nice if there was an option to make a light only illuminate a layer. Not sure how difficult this would be to implement, but I'm throwing it out there anyways.
-"Update Shadow Maps" menu item. Sometimes, spot lights don't update their shadow maps, so you gotta wiggle them.
Comments
This one's a bit nitpicky, but I think the Layer editor dialogue (you know, where you name the Layer and choose it's color) shouldn't close on enter. That regularly fucks with me.
I remember having a lot more complaints, but I can't think of them right now.
+1.
But of course, having layer folders will require an update to the LVL format... so probably not going to happen with ns2.
NS3 IT IS, THEN!
Selecting all lights/entities: You can filter which objects you can select with the six buttons on the bottom right corner. You can also select every object in a layer by selecting the layer and clicking the mouse button button in the bottom left corner. Pro tip: You can select everything that is NOT in a layer by clicking that same button without having a layer selected.
You can combine this to select all lights/entities/props.
If you need something from another map: Pressing on a window's entry in the taskbar with your third mouse button (the wheel) will create a new instance of it. Doing so with the editor will open the editor a second time, empty. You can open your second map there and just copy paste from one window to the other.
Wow I didn't know that! Here I am, launching each instance of editor from launchpad, like some kind of peasant!
If you use the middle-mouse click to launch a new instance, will that instance still use the mod directory, or will it act as though you launched the editor outside of launch pad?
EDIT: Just checked, and the answer is no. So if you're using custom textures, you'll need to run the extra instance from launchpad.
not sure if this is possible already but...
i would like to be able to weld a vertex to a vertex with only 1 vertex moving to the others position.
go back to your launchpad you dirty peasant
I'd love to be able to do this too! But unfortunately, the best we have now is a two-step process: 1) click and drag the vertex to the target vertex (NOT using the manipulator, just deselect it if the manipulator is getting in your way). It will snap to the nearest face/edge/vertex as you drag it along. Then select both vertices and ctrl+w in select mode. Also note that everything that is selected, vertex or not, is going to get dragged along with the vertex you have selected, provided the vertex was already selected (otherwise it'll just de-select everything and move only the vertex).
This snapping, which I only know about because you created a thread about it once, is actually one of the most, if not the most, useful features in the editor.
Mainly because it lets you fight the grid more effectively.
It's a life saver too! Say I accidentally get off-grid because I forgot to push "," before moving a big selection. Well, all you have to do is find a vertex on your shape that should be on-grid and match it up with a vertex elsewhere that you know is on-grid.
Or press Ctrl + z...
Maybe I didn't catch it in time.
I can reliably crash the editor by opening my map and scrolling all the way down in the prop browser.
Create and Flip Face should also work when you have any other tool than the basic select tool selected.
Also, the editor generally does a horribly job at guessing what I want to do, e.g. when I double click an edge. But I think that's hard to fix...
I merged your 3 short posts into this one
edit: How dare you. - Vetinari
Here :
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/133936/suggestions-for-the-editor#latest
And i add also:
A geometry optimizer / debugger :
Sometime you extrude and finally remove useless lines.
So stay a corner (like a 90° angle) composed of many segments which are useless and add to triangulation. If the face is planar and a side is composed of several segments that are perfectly aligned and contiguous. Just remove the useless vertex.
Use of a key to tell the editor to make the right decision concerning double click on a segment. I can't count any more the number of times i shouted about it.
No key +DC : select whatever continuity the editor wants (faces already created usually)
special key + DC: always try to create a new face by selecting the right segments (avoid already created faces).
Of course none of this will ever happen.
a) copy paste stuff from one map to another one to the cursor position.
b) create a map only with basic forms, which i can just copy into my map to the cursor position.
Situation right now:
Paste to cursor position only works for selecting a prop in the browser and paste it to the cursor location,
but not for geometry. Would save a lot of time. Right now, everybody is creating more or less each part of
a map from scratch without using existing level parts of other maps.
That would be nice. What I do in the mean time is copy+paste existing parts of the map, and line them up using the vertex-drag-snap feature.
Yea that would be great too.
Diagonals do suck!. Sometimes I've had to work at 0°, then rotate it when I'm completely done with it. Really tricky to do. If we do get to rotate the grid, there should be an option to keep stuff on-grid... probably would only work for exactly 45° but it'd be nice if the grid scaled up by 1.4142 so that the diagonals would still be on-grid on the orthogonal grid.
...this make life SOO much easier. It is easily the single most useful secondary feature in the editor, actually.
That'd be amazing!
It may not be the same but Alt is copying the texture selected (paint tool) with a single click.
So Alt+click.
Yea but that resets the angle, scale, and shift properties as well. He's asking for a way to copy ONLY the texture over, preserving the shift, scale, and angle values... which are usually the values that take most of your times fine-tuning.
That doesn't happen me, alt+click retains all properties of the selected material.
Mmmm.... yes it does. What we're saying is it would be nice if it DIDN'T retain the properties of the SELECTED material, but merely swapped out the MATERIAL it reference, while keeping the coordinates intact. So if you've got some curved trim on a FLAT surface, and you've already rotated them all so they flow properly, but swap it out for a different material, it'd be nice to be able to alt+click and retain the angle.
A shallow copy is not what I'm asking for. You may have to changes rotation and shift so that the textures are aligned across their shared edge. The easiest way to understand what I'm asking for is too boot up valve hammer and try it.
Valve describes it as "Apply all the current material settings to the face that is clicked with wrapping/alignment to the previously selected face.", which is still kind of cryptic.
What it's actually doing is more clever than that. The planes don't even need to meet along a shared edge. You can extend the faces into planes and find the edge where those planes meet. Then you wrap the texture along that edge. The faces don't interesect if they are parallell, so just copy the texture parameters in that corner case. if you have a bunch of faces on one flat wall (one plane) meeting a bunch of faces on another flat wall (another plane), you only need to select one face and then click, in no particular order, with alt + RMB on the rest of the faces to get a perfectly aligned texture across all of the faces. If they needed to share an edge, you could still do that, but you would have to keep selecting adjacent faces as you go.
Yea I think I got you. It sounds like it's just adding the values together, so if you have one texture rotated 90 degrees from another (ie a vertical trim instead of a horizontal trim texture) it'll keep it lined up once the new texture is applied.