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 Changes to TEDIT 
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Unread post Changes to TEDIT
Ok, I'd like to get into the specifics of the changes in TEDIT. I obviously feel that these changes have added a lot of functionality to the game, but is it worth it? Here's what I've done in a nutshell:

1) Cleaned up Alien Traders and Ferrengi editors, fixed some bugs and cleaned up the commands.

2) Added a Gold alien editor for editing active Gold aliens in the game.

3) Changed handling of special planet and port editors

3a) Terra has its own special edit screen under Planet Editor. It can no longer be edited as a generic planet, since Terra uses the data fields differently than other planets. Ore doesn't mean the same thing on Terra as it does for a player planet, for example. So the new editor exposes the fields for Terra as they're meant to be used. The goal is to allow as much flexibility with Terra, but to do it in a more controlled way to eliminated unexpected problems arising from changing Terra's data in the editor. This editor also pulls various Terra-related settings from the general editors and puts them here for convenience.

3b) The class zero ports and StarDock each have their own special edit screens under Port Editor. As with Terra, these ports use their data fields differently than other ports. The new editors attempt to control access to these fields in ways that are consistent with their use. If you find some functionality lacking, report it and I'll add it.

4) Removed the flags settings for several editors, and replaced them with specific settings that effect those flags. The flags are generally meant to be used in groups, so changing one can have unexpected consequences. The flag edit screen was put in place as a quick solution to allow gameops to change those flags, especially in cases where data is corrupted (a ship is flagged as occupied when it isn't, etc), but the better solution is to expose each of those settings in a controlled way.

4a) To make room for these new settings, and to make the editors more organized and human-readable, many options were moved. They kept their command key and on-screen text in hopes that they would still work with scripts, but their relative locations on the screen may have changed. If this creates specific issues with scripts, I will work with gameops to restore functionality.

5) Many obsolete settings were removed from the general editors, and some have been moved to new editors. Some new settings have been added.

6) In the sector editor, I've changed the way in-sector assets are displayed. Instead of showing every asset in a list in the main screen, I show a count of the number of such assets (planets, aliens, ships, etc), with a command key to display that list. This makes the sector editor much more human-readable, but obviously could break some scripts.

Also, entering the sector number at the editor main prompt will take you to that sector.

7) All asset editors now have functional initialization and deletion commands. Initialization includes prompts for any required fields, making it easier to introduce assets into your games.

8) Added the version number to the upper right corner to help identify the version that's running for scripts that want to support multiple versions.

Now that the main editors have been cleaned up, I don't expect major changes to them moving forward. I wanted to do all of the changes in one update rather than work them in little by little over time.

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Wed Nov 16, 2011 4:40 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
The "S" sector section was completely re-wrote which destroyed my sweeper script. Same with the "N", the layout of what the script triggered on was completely rearranged. Might be more but those were the 2 I noticed the most changes to. It took me less than 1 day to do a complete re-write from scratch and it is 1/3 the lines of code as the original. So win/win for me! :)
I am not complaining as I like the new options, it is what it is. Your writing new code to make the game better so why shouldn't I write some, all part of things change and I have heard it over and over..... ADAPT OR DIE :lol:

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Wed Nov 16, 2011 6:04 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
T0yman wrote:
The "S" sector section was completely re-wrote which destroyed my sweeper script. Same with the "N", the layout of what the script triggered on was completely rearranged. Might be more but those were the 2 I noticed the most changes to. It took me less than 1 day to do a complete re-write from scratch and it is 1/3 the lines of code as the original. So win/win for me! :)
I am not complaining as I like the new options, it is what it is. Your writing new code to make the game better so why shouldn't I write some, all part of things change and I have heard it over and over..... ADAPT OR DIE :lol:


I am glad I took time to read up on this some more. That is exactly where I too was struggling with our server-side scripts. With Thrawn absent, I could not figure out where the issue with one of our multiple scripts was located. Thank you for spelling it out. Now I hope I can find the issue and fix it faster.


Wed Nov 16, 2011 6:13 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
Should be good to play with and see what type of scripts we can come up with to create different game scenarios. Once I get my new combat and cashing scripts finished (hopefully by January), I will give it a try.

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Wed Nov 16, 2011 6:51 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
I can't remember all the specifics, but in a Chat with Vid I remember him saying the Planet editing menu was really changed and messed a lot up.

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Wed Nov 16, 2011 6:53 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
Promethius wrote:
Should be good to play with and see what type of scripts we can come up with to create different game scenarios. Once I get my new combat and cashing scripts finished (hopefully by January), I will give it a try.


I'll pay you cash for a complete script pack that your working on.


Wed Nov 16, 2011 7:02 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
RP , this was true .. but as of late that has been fixed with a compromise that will work ok now.

The fix now has it so to initialize the planet all is needed is to send A* in twx script instead of having to give planet name and location before it will initialize.

So this is only a minor change needed to the Wandering Trophy Planet script
to make this work in the new release.

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Wed Nov 16, 2011 7:06 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
The new handling of asset lists on the S screen is a good example of what a "legacy" setting might do. It makes sense to compact all of that onto one screen for humans to read, but scripts have no problem dealing with a sector that scrolls through 5 or 6 pages. So something like that would work very easily on a toggle. Some other things would be a bit more messy, like providing two entirely different formats for many of the editor screens. But the biggest impact of that, aside from a bit more work on my part, would be some executable bloat, which is always a problem.

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Thu Nov 17, 2011 2:33 am
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
JP,

Has any more thought been given to adding something to TEDIT to flag a sector as alien space, or gold alien homeworld?

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Thu Nov 17, 2011 1:23 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
This would require some restructuring of data. There currently can be only one homeworld. Also, homespace is not stored, but is generated procedurally. Both of these things can be changed in order to add some greater flexibility. But they're not trivial changes, so I don't want to get into them right now. I'm trying to limit myself to minor changes and bug fixes right now, and the next major feature will be truce mode. Just waiting until I have enough time to work through that.

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Thu Nov 17, 2011 4:31 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
Also if anyone is interested in continued testing .. come get into a running game
@ telnet://twgs.classictw.com
and debug away ...

There still might be a bug or two to find , come help and get this finished.

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Thu Nov 17, 2011 7:29 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
John Pritchett wrote:
This would require some restructuring of data. There currently can be only one homeworld. Also, homespace is not stored, but is generated procedurally. Both of these things can be changed in order to add some greater flexibility. But they're not trivial changes, so I don't want to get into them right now. I'm trying to limit myself to minor changes and bug fixes right now, and the next major feature will be truce mode. Just waiting until I have enough time to work through that.


Thanks for the update. For some reason I had thought you had said they were just flags somewhere.

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Thu Nov 17, 2011 10:01 pm
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Unread post Re: Changes to TEDIT
I did talk about converting the homespace allocation to flags, which is something I will do as part of the truce mode implementation. I want to be able to flag sectors as part of the truce rules, so flagging it as homespace would be a simple thing, as well as Fedspace or whatever. I think that's what you were thinking of. So once truce rules are implemented, I'll be much closer to being able to add this functionality for Gold aliens.

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Fri Nov 18, 2011 11:18 am
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