Offline Ship Editor

[CJSBiliskner]

I\'m loving this program so far, the copy paste feature is great for redundant work.

One thing that I\'d really love to use is another rotate feature, where we can choose to rotate just the selection instead of the entire ship. This, and a mirroring feature that could just flip the selection across an axis, as both of these would be greatly helpful with large projects.

Great on the program so far, I\'m looking forward to any updates!

 

[Ethoir]

Feature request:

The ability to go into the modify menu, click move, and manually drag the core to its new location. XYZ confuses me too much so I\'d like to drag and drop the core where I want it to be. During this, the \"front\" of the core should be colored differently so we know which wich face is the front.



Second, the viewer should be able to clip through the hull so we can see inside it if it is hollow. This will help make it easier to drag the core to its new location on the ship.



I tried to set XYZ on the core, but not knowing what it meant and not having a way to identify the location of any block onscreen except the core (8,8,8) made it confusing and difficult.

 

[jjaquinta]

OK. I\'ve added in a Reflect which you can use to reflect along the X, Y, and/or Z axis. And I\'ve enabled both Reflect and Rotate to operate on the current selection.

[Oops. Just realized I forgot to reflect wedges and corners. Give me a little time for that... Fixed now!]

I\'ve been thinking about a \"Force Symmetry\" function. Say, for example, you want to do a very customized ship. Rather than painstakenly doing all those custom edits on both sides, you could just do one half, bring it into the tool and say \"Force X symmetry\", and it will delete the left half of the ship, and make it a reflected copy of the right half.

Yeah, I know that there is a symmetrical build option in StarMade. But I\'d think that\'s a fairly painful thing to use. And, with this sort of thing, we could implement other forms of symmetry. Maybe you want symmetry in multiple planes, radial symmetry, helical symmetry, or I don\'t know what.

Thoughts?

 

[jjaquinta]

These are hard to do because the mouse is, explicitly, a 2D manipulation object, and we\'re trying to do a 3D move. Say you click move on the core and drag the mouse left. What XYZ transition should we actually do on the core? How do we determine what is the \"front\" of the core?

Have you discovered View -> Axis? I think that might solve your problems. Since the axis is always centered on the core, you can see where the core is in relation to the rest of the ship. The clipping might get confusing: you can see the core, but not the ship. I think the axis approach gives you both. Also, the axis tells you visually which way is what. X,Y,Z -> Red,Green,Blue. Bright is +ve, Dark is -ve.

Another feature I\'ve been considering is \"nudge\". You make a selection and then hit, say, Alt+WASD(QE) to move the selection around the place. If you do select all, you\'ll move the whole ship. But, since the core has to stay at 8,8,8, it is effectively moving the core. But you can instantly see what way, say A is moving you, and correct if you are wrong. (Plus \"undo\" will be coming soon.)

Give the Axis a try and let me know if that satisfies your needs. If not, I\'ll scratch my head and try to work out the usability problems with moving stuff in 3D with a 2D mouse.

 

[Ethoir]

What I was getting at is that when I tried the original \"move\" feature, it asked me for physical numbers. The only numbrs I knew were 8,8,8 which the program calculates as the center of the ship no matter what, so thats where it put the core when I imported a binvoxed ship. Anyway, when I gave it a set of numbers, it put the core /way/ off to the left and near the top of the window. It was really a pain in the butt and I gave up trying to figure out what the XYZ I wanted to put the core where I wanted because the viewer would not zoom in through the hull (nor did it tell me what XYZ I was viewing.



In my particular case the ship has a big hole in it (by design) between its primary and secondary hulls and 8,8,8 (the core) was outside the shiup snuggled close to the rear of the primary hull, marking that as the middle of the entire ship. While this may be true, I wanted to move the core into the primary hull near where the bridge will be built. Manual XYZ relocation backfired three ways from next week as described in the previous paragraph (that and it wouldn\'t let me move it back).



I gave Axis a look and adjusted the X axis of the core from 8,8,8 to 9,8,8 and the core moved by a small leap about two dozen blocks to the right instead of just one block. Something seems to be translating wrong I think.

 

[jjaquinta]

The reason it jumped was because the numbers you type in are how far to move the core, now where to. I figured it would be easier to say \"I want to move the core one to the right, therefore 1, 0, 0\" rather than doing the arithametic of where you want to send it to. You ended up moving it 9 along the X axis, 8 along the Y and 8 along the Z. Which is why you saw the jump.

With that in mind, look at the axis again. That should make things easier.

I\'d like to do an info-bar. Right now that space is occupied by my beg bar. I\'ll see if I can put both in and not have it look horrible. In any event, once I raise enough money to buy my daughter a Minecraft Lego kit I\'ll consider this little project \"paid for\" and remove all begging stuff.

Also, once I\'m confident in the SMEdit launcher, I\'ll start doing YouTube videos. No one seems to read text anymore. So I figure that would be useful. I may also put a page up on the Wiki, and maybe some tutorials there for old skool people who still read!

 

[CJSBiliskner]

I think that if you were to add extra symmetry options, the most useful that I can think of would x/y/z symmetry within a selection. This would be very useful on larger works where giant sections are off center but still need to be symmetrical in their own area. I guess this would be sort of like the symmetry in multiple planes like you said?

Also the radial symmetry sounds very interesting for more.... non-boxy builds. You could select the fraction of a circle that you want copied and it\'ll paste it around the center axis?

EDIT: Oh and before I forget, I think I\'ve found a small visual bug in the ship rendering whereas lines are a bit distorted, this isn\'t very visible in \"busy\" ships but when you have a box or simple shape, the far end of the box will seem bigger than the near end of the box. I guess you could describe it as a reversed perspective. This isn\'t a big bug that affects use, but wanted to make it known all the same.

 

[jjaquinta]

Right now, for simple symmetry, you could do it like this. Build half a nacelle, copy it to the clipboard. Move the selection point over, paste it back in, then do a reflection on the selection.

I guess it might be easier if had a \"paste as new selection\" option.

And, yeah, that\'s what I was thinking for radial symmetry. Or even you do a single layer of blocks, and it rotates all of that around one of the axies.

I\'ll check out the visual bug. Right now there should be no perspective at all. I do want to update it so that there is, and you can zoom around your ship like you do in the game. But if I keep going in that direction I\'ll end up re-implementing all of OpenGL. I might just bite the bullet at some point and switch to OpenGL for my rendering engine. I always get headaches when dealing with OpenGL though.

 

[Ethoir]

I think the info bar can go above the begging bar.



Anyway I also like the idea of nudging. Right now WSAD just move your \"camera\" as opposed to the core. Also wish the camera would stay centered on the core when you are rotating it in mouselook mode. Would make lining it up with a certain white block in a sea of grey easier.



Okay, so I mived the core to where I want. Next problem: it cut off the back 1/8th of my ship. I noticed someone else saw this. Problem is my ship is 300 meters long and it effectively \"erased\" the rear 100 blocks when I moved the core. Is there an option to correct that?

 

[jjaquinta]

I thought I fixed that. There was a problem with superblocks with a -1 coordinate. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

Nudging is much easier to do. I\'ll nudge it up the priority list.

 

[Ethoir]

I can confirm this behavior since it correlates to what I\'m seeing. Silaz a few pages back noticed this and you confirmed it four days ago.



The voxelized ship I\'m using is 300 meters long. If I leave the core in its default location when imported, the ship will write into a blueprint just fine. But moving the core to where I want it to be (where it isn\'t in an inappropriate place or in open space) causes the tool to write the reat hundred blocks into a file like \"ship.0.0.-1.smd2\".



Problem is that I can\'t shrink it down to fit without sacrificing functionality of the intended ship design. The hangar bay doors are already only 3 blocks tall. That\'s a bit too small to be a carrier but its fine for holding non-com shuttles. If its scaled down any further, the only ships that would be able to get in would be ship cores. :/



I\'ll be keeping an eye on this. This tool has a lot of potential to make my ship designing life easier. And replica-building life even more easier (300 meter length akira class in starmade ftw)

 

[teoboxteo]

should i downlaod it?

 

[jjaquinta]

I don\'t want you to have to shrink your ship at all! I\'m just annoyed because I thought I fixed it. I\'m not sure why moving the core changes anything. All that should matter are the overall dimensions. >_<

Can you do an Edit -> Report on your ship before and after the move? Either paste it in here or email it to [email protected].

I\'ll see if I can put the nail in this coffin tomorrow. I\'m getting really tired of this bug!

 

[teoboxteo]

and how do u place blocks?

 

[Tenaka]

The current ship I\'m working on with this editor(which is a totally awesome program by the way), was an obj import at 750m long. With the core in the original spot it would cut off the back part. Moving the core back 150 or so blocks toward the back resulted in this...

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c336/Tenaka_Khan/starmade-screenshot-0000.png

Thus far the only way that I\'ve been able to get it to spawn the full ship was to move the core outside of the ship.



Even still, this is a nice and very handy program, thank you

TK

 

[jjaquinta]

Right now you can\'t place arbitrary blocks. The in-game editor is very good at that. I\'m trying to tackle the things the in-game editor doesn\'t do first. The most popuilar features so far appear to be rotating the ship around the core, moving the core, and importing OBJ and binvox meshes.

I\'ll get to individual block editing eventually. But for now I\"m trying to supplement, not re-implement, the in-game editor.

 

[jjaquinta]

Ah. Now I think I see what is going on, and why I didn\'t find it.

From the jaggies there, I think what is happening is that the chunks inside a superchunk are being written in the wrong order. See how they appear to be in 16 block strips? Probably another integer arithametic error.

The test model I\'ve been using is just a cube with 250m long \"whiskers\" jutting out in each axil direction. That\'s obviously not going to turn up this particular error. I\'ll update the model and get on it today. Should be an easy fix now that I have a handle on what\'s going on.

Thanks for the help debugging!

 

[Photonic]

Hi I recently made a turret and I noticed I placed the ship core in the wrong place after some searching on the forums I found this thread and I was happy to have found a ship editor with a ton of functions. Now the problem is I can\'t delete or add blocks to my blueprints I can only paint the hull blocks and select certain blocks to view. Now I think I might have misplaced some of the files that add certain functions.

I took the following steps by the installment of your ship editor:

1) I placed the jo_sm.jar file in Starmade directory

2) I made a new sub-directory: jo_plugins

3) I put in the second file

4) I entered my Starmade directory when it asked

5)I open my turret blueprint and we arrive at the above-mentioned problem



I think I need to unzip it with winrar for example at some point but I am not sure.

I hope this post is clear enough so that the problem can be resolved.

Thanks for reading

 

[jjaquinta]

You\'ve installed correctly.

Scroll up to reply #234. Upshot: Initially I\'m trying to supplement the in-game editor, not duplicate it. So I\'m mostly working on things the in-game editor doesn\'t do.

 

[Ethoir]

Now that I had a little sleep I managed to get screenshots to better describe it. Not that I think it needs further elaboration.

The blue dot is where the tool puts the core by default after importing the binvox. The green dot is where I move it to. The red rectangle is the part the tool assigns a -1 to as a superchunk which then fails to load in-game. The orange box is a chunk of the ship that the tool \"copies\" and pastes a short distance from the front of the ship when I import the ship\'s blueprint into the tool.



The end result is this when loaded in-game:



So hopefully it will be able to handle those -1 smd2 chunks in future patches.



EDIT: Also here\'s the report you asked for.

Before moving the Core (3 90 deg X-Axis rotations to line it up with the direction the core is facing in-game)

Bounds: (-92, -16, -120) -- (108, 33, 135)
Mass : 69848
Core : (8, 8, 8)
Breakdown:
1 CORE
69847 99% HULL_COLOR_GREY

After moving the Core (minor painting of the hull to act as a \"bullseye\" for core placement)

Bounds: (-92, -25, -184) -- (108, 24, 71)
Mass : 69848
Core : (8, 8, 8)
Breakdown:
1 CORE
69797 99% HULL_COLOR_GREY
49 HULL_COLOR_PURPLE
1 HULL_COLOR_WHITE