Offline Ship Editor

[jjaquinta]

OK, I\'ve enabled blueprint writing. However, it doesn\'t update the supplementary information yet. Any substansive change to the ship design will cause it to fail. I got a \"blueprint altered\" error and it deleted my blueprint. So be sure to back up!

I was successful at changing the color of a ship. That didn\'t alter the price so I think it was cool with that. Rotating and core moving might also work, based on the same logic. Just be very careful.

 

[jjaquinta]

I forgot about the issues tracker. I guess that could be used. It would be nice to have the vote-up/vote-down feature. I checked out the other suggestions but one is only free for the first month, and the second was only free for the first 5 users. Bugzilla does what I want, but no one seems to host it for free. I tried installing it on my home server, but it gave some mysterious perl error message after I followed the steps. I\'m more of a servlet/JSP person, I\'m not all that experienced in LAMP. So I\'m stuck.

If you are looking at the stuff, the raw stuff is in my personal fork jjaquinta/StarMade. I move it over to StarMade/StarMade when it gets stable. I moved the feature system to be Action based, so it\'s easy to add menus. General manipulation has been moved to plugins, so you don\'t even have to touch core code for that.

Reading/writing of .smb2 files is going pretty well. Where the headaches are is keeping them in sync with the anciliary files. For entity based objects, they have to be in sync with the .ent file. I just improved the entity reading stuff (which you can test with DumpEntityFile and EditEntityFile) so that it now correctly understands the SERIALIZED tag. So now we can modify the entity file. We just have to work out what in the entity file to modify.

Similarly with blueprints, I just turned on writing the .smb2 file, but without altering the other two files you can\'t do anything substantive. That format is better known so I was going to start looking at that.

At some point I wanted to start making generators. Planet generators, rock generators, and even ship generators. Ever play Traveller? I thought I\'d start with a hull generator; lets you pick one of several basic shapes. Extend that to let you choose what % or #blocks to use for engines, power, shields, etc. As you for the # hardpoints, and %/blocks per hard point. Then spit out a ship to those specs.

If you\'re set on Undo/Redo, I had some thoughts. It\'s probably impractical to store a copy of the whole Grid each time a change is made. But if at each checkpoint you store a copy of the delta, that would save memory. (More so if you serialize and compress it, since it\'s got a lot of redundant data.) Would need utility functions to compare two SparseMatrix obejcts and return a SparseMatrix containing the differences. Another to apply one SparseMatrix to another, etc.

 

[FineNerds]

I really think this will be most useful especially for those that build there ships backwards and stuff :P Really looking for future upates

 

[jjaquinta]

Someone created a deviant art group for posting StarMade pictures. I thought this was a cool idea and so added a quick feature to dump port, starboard, fore, aft, dorsal, ventral, and isometric views of a ship. Plus a contact sheet with all of them.

Give it a go. The code is generic so I can do any angle you think is worthwhile. I thought of dumping the length/bredth/height of the ship in one of the blank squares. Any other stats that would be worth it?

In other news: write-blueprints now writes out an updated header file. That stops StarMade barfing when you reference it. But it still doesn\'t get it quite right. Moving on to writing out logic and meta files.

 

[sagethe13th]

You have done a great job with this and deserve to be showered with praise. Keep up the good work.

Mass is an important stat and it\'s easy to calculate since it\'s currently just a block count.

 

[jjaquinta]

Since you were so nice, I went and added in width/breadth/depth/mass. I may have some of the axis wrong. Let me know!

(If you want to shower me with more than priase, I also updated my begging links to include the e-book version of the audio book there! Downloads make me happy! Purchases make my daughter happy!)

 

[mou]

very nice work

can you send me your email address, I m the dev of starmade tools on android I could add your app in it if you send me the source

[email protected]

 

[jjaquinta]

I\'ve extended File->Open File so that it will read .smbent files directly.

My code is now re-writing logic files when you save. This should improve saving of blueprints. But it didn\'t seem to work any better for me. :-( Oh, well. On to the meta file. That should solve *everything*. In theory.

 

[mcrbradbury]

This is amazing! keep up the good work!

 

[Awsumnick]

This looks awesome! Even if you don\'t add a ton of new features and stuffs, the thought of modelling something in Blender and impoorting it into StarMade sounds uber useful. I\'ve always wanted to build gigantic space stations and cruisers but I don\'t have tons of free time to spend making those sorts of things just to realize that i don\'t like the way it looks (I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to things I create). Keep up the great work dude!

 

[jjaquinta]

Yay! I finally got write working reliably. It had to do with the offset table in row-major vs column-major order, blah, blah, blah.

The upshot is that you can start to do some real editing now. I read in the Isanth, use a Mod to double its size, wrote it back out as a blueprint (new feature: Save As), and was able to buy it in-game.

It won\'t work on ships with attachments (e.g. turrets). There\'s bits missing. But my expectation is that it will work pretty well on \"normal\" ships. Try it out. Let me know the bugs.

I\'ll move on to OBJ file import, since people seem keen on that.

[Remember, if you find it genuinely useful, please download my book. The first 20% is free, and more downloads push me up the list. If you really like the program, please buy the book, and I\'ll be a step closer to buying my daughter that Minecraft lego!]

 

[jjaquinta]

I got the basics of this going. It works with Vii\'s sample file. It\'s a little slow, but it seems to function without blowing the memory limit, which was my biggest fear.

To use, open some other ship, and do Mods->Import. Give it the full path to the OBJ file, and pick the longest dimension. It will scale accordingly. You don\'t need to resize your shape, or voxelize it.

Right now it just fills the space inside the shape with grey hull. (You can use Mods->Hollow to hollow it out.) It doesn\'t place a core, so you probably can\'t load it in.

But I\'d like people to test with their models. Different 3D editing tools write OBJ files in different ways. So I want to make sure it supports most common use cases. If you can\'t import and see the model, write a note here and attach (or point at) your OBJ file and I\'ll give it a test.

 

[theDragn]

Found a bug, smoothing with hardened hull works, but the wedges are created in a damaged state. I\'m not sure if normal wedges do this too.

 

[jjaquinta]

Can you send me a link to the hardened pre-smoothed hull? I can try your ship out myself and see the problem.

 

[Gasboy]

Which files do I need to download? I don\'t see a \"Mods/Import\" button, for instance.

EDIT: Okay, I think I have everything. I do have a question, does importing an .OBJ file take a long time? Or have I managed to make the program hang... Hrmmm.

 

[jjaquinta]

Give it a few minutes. The 20 meg file I had ended up with 20,000 triangles or some such. It took, dunno, 5-10 minutes. How big is your file? Any idea how many trianges? If you link to it, I\'ll try it out myself in the debugger and see what\'s up.

 

[Arlin.Del'Adre]

I enjoy the idea of creating whatever i can in block based games be it minecraft of starmade or guncraft, but i hate the block by block placing (i know kinda hypocritical)... however i have yet to learn how to use a 3d modeling program.. ive looked into it and its to much for me to pick through just to learn how to make files to load into your program...



Ive read some previous posts about using blender.. my question is, is their an existing tutorial for this kind of thing.. if not could someone here make a tutorial for noobs like me...

 

[mou]

gimme your paypal! I want to donate!

 

[Gasboy]

Some were more successful than others. I guess that I was just being impatient, and so waited longer. When I get back to my computer, I\'ll link a couple of files that did not work.

Your program has a lot of promise!

 

[jjaquinta]

3d modelling is not simple. All the professional ones (Maya, 3dS, Blender) confuse the crap out of me. The non-professional ones (Second Life, Minecraft, etc) are all limited. The only one that I\'ve used successfully and consistently has been POVRay, but that\'s because it\'s more like programming than modelling, and that\'s what I\'m good at. Your mileage will vary.

There are just some things out there that are sufficiently complex that you need to put a professional amount of time into to get anything better than amateur results. If you are dedicated and stick to it, you\'ll get better over time. If you want to pick it up over a weekend... this is not the thing.

I\'m not trying to bring you down. I\'ve gone through the same thing. I completely suck at 3d modelling and I\'m not willing to put the time into it. (If I was good at it, I wouldn\'t be writing this tool!) What you can do is troll the model web sites, find other designs that are good, and use/modify them.

If you don\'t nbelieve me, take it from Cheezburger: