Offline Ship Editor

[jjaquinta]

1. Most of the contents for the modify menu is from plugins. Make sure you have downloaded JoFileMods.jar and put it in a jo_plugins directory in your StarMade directory.
2. The mods menu is context sensitive. The program launches with no context selected. You need to do File -> Open to load in a ship. I know, it\'s kind of daft if the first thing you want to do is use Hull and Fill to auto-make a ship. I will be adding File -> New soonish. But for now, you need to load in another ship, make your new one, and then do Save As.

 

[Cjen1]

sorry got it working it turned out that it wasn\'t accepting the file that I put it in as the starmade directory so now it is working great

 

[Gasboy]

Is for people to save a ship core as a ship. Then just load it up in the offline viewer and go from there.

 

[Soban]

I\'d like to note that i would not consider this safe for large ships at this point for two reasons.

First, there was some stuff I deleted from the ship in game that appeared in the veiwer, but not in the game.

Second, when I tried to rotate my ship, there were several points of disjunction where a row looked like it had been added/removed. I suspect the reason for this is the chunking format that was mentioned earlier in the thread.

 

[jjaquinta]

How big is big? Anything that is still in one smb2 file should be fine. You can get things (like planets) that span more than one smb2 file, and there may be problems there. Is your ship that big?

It also doesn\'t handle attachments. At all.

In any event, if you have problems with a ship, please send me a copy of your ship file, so I can reproduce and fix. Just warning people isn\'t enough. Lets work to make it better. You can post a link here, or else e-mail to [email protected].

The other thing to note is that it does make a .bak file. You\'re still better off backing everything up for sanity sake. But in case you forgot, it tries to help there.

 

[Soban]

I will try to reproduce it and let you know.

*edt: sent bug report. i hope this helps.

 

[jjaquinta]

Thanks! I was able to replicate the problem. Sometimes StarMade isn\'t completely consistent with orientation values for wedges. 8 and 12 appear to be the same, and 10 and 14 are the same. For some reason your ship had some of these off values. I\'ve updated the code to deal with the odd duplicates.

I also noticed a display error when there was hardened hull. I fixed that too.

Between the two fo them, I seemed to be able to rotate in the X & Z axis without problems. Please download the new version and try it out. Let me know if it fixes the problem, or if there are new ones.

 

[Jeheace]

Is there a max sized ship that this can load?

 

[Silaz]

I recently tried to import an obj with no luck. Any advice?

here is the file I tried:
https://mega.co.nz/#!jUwQFY5S!DRBbJRbIHGyTBLWjiSprpmepRdZhbrx-yQSou9NRBrg

 

[jjaquinta]

This tool can load planets. So, technically, it should be able to load arbitrary sized ships. Can it save them as blueprints? Not yet. I don\'t think the blueprint write code supports saving ships that span more than one data file. But it might. I haven\'t tested it. More likely the performance will be an issue. It\'s pretty slow when trying to render planets. Selecting View->Fancy Graphics (i.e. turn it off) will help a bit with performance.

 

[jjaquinta]

Yeah, I got a problem with this and another file someone sent me. The underlying issue is that blender is spitting out degenerate triangles. I.e. triangles where two out of three points are all the same, or where all there points are in a line. My code just assumed all triangles were legitimate and ran into problems when thrown a curve ball.

I added some protection in, and a new mode \"force convex\". This gives slightly better results, but I not sure the result is usable for those files yet. Try it out. Maybe there are some settings you can flip on blender to dumb the output down. After all, it\'s going to be pixelized on my end anyway! I\'ll keep working to see if I can get the quality up.

 

[jjaquinta]

In addition to the above improvement in importing OBJ files, the new posting also has a new Paint Mod: replace colors. You pick two colors, and it replaces all instances of the first one with the second one. It was a request from someone who wanted to keep the paintjob they already have, but change it to a faction\'s colors.

Enjoy (and post bugs here!)

 

[_shifty]

thank you so much

 

[Silaz]

Jjaquinta, I\'ve never come across someone who implements bug fixes and features so quickly! You\'re awesome!
Unfortantly, I still was not able to import my obj file. I have an 3930k at 4.6GHz and it was on about hour 4.5 with a constant 25% utilization with nothing imported. I\'m not quite sure how easy it would be to do this with your program. I was able to use binvox and have a viewable cube verison of the ship but obviously its not saved in starmades file format. Maybe instead of pure obj files it would be easier to import binvox files since it already uses cubes? Just throwing out ideas!

 

[jjaquinta]

I started with OBJ because it\'s a pretty common format and I already had code to parse it. I\'m happy to do any other popular and documented format.

I just googled \"binvox file format\" and I think I found what looks like a good defition. Shoud be pretty simple, since it is kind of made for this. No complicated 3D math. (The OBJ analysis has to do fun things like intersect a 3D line with 3D triangles, and work out the normal of each intersecting triangle to see if we\'re inside or outside the object.) I can probably get something going tonight.

As for speed... heh heh. I only get an hour or two a day at this, so I try to make it count. I\'ve been around the block a few times (and am pretty far over the hill). I was on some other game project and a few of the others felt bad because I was so much faster than them. I had to explain that I had been doing this since, literally, before they were out of diapers and that, comparatively, they were much further ahead of where I was when I was their age. I want to encourage people, not brag.

Just remember, in the end, I\'m am striving, through excellent customer service, to get people to buy my book. Baby needs a minecraft lego kit...

 

[MichaelSeph]

Feature suggestion 1:

This tool actually needs a Ctrl+Z to Undo (and secondarily Ctrl+Y to Redo) function, for example you accidentally click \"All\" when repainting a different colors ship, or edit weaponry/harder stuff, there is no way to go back.

2: Arrows, or maybe Ctrl+Arrows to fine spin the object in such directions in detailed/step by step, like when moving a selection at Gimp/image editors. Seeing the ship from exactly front to see if there\'s no mistake in the energy system or weapon systems can be problematic with medium builds, and very hard with huger builds. It could also simply have the View options of \"Front view\" \"Back view\", laterals and a upper left/right corner diagonal view like for making photos, showoff.

3: Having the tool to support all current existing blocks, the issues people had with opening blueprints so far, by what I\'d guess/my experience, is with blueprints that have decorative blocks, gardens, and such, mainly those 2D blended blocks.

4: At \"View\" specific parts, Energy Tanks (Capacity blocks) option is missing.

 

[jjaquinta]

I\'ll add those to the list.

#1. I\'m starting to feel the pain of that too. I know what to do to implement it. I just have to get to it. The more people who ask, the higher up the list it goes.

For #2, I was going to take some keyboard controls from MCEdit. I got as far as WASD(QE) for moving your POV. But right now that really just moves the ship. I have to do some deeper changes to really let you move the POV around the place.

#3 is fair criticism. I\'ve avoided custom stuff up till now. I just hard code the default blocks and only read the XML file for the images. I\'m not sure the XML identifies hull, corner and wedge blocks, which are treated specially. But I\'ll look at it again and see if I can just support all unknown ones as generic.

#4. Give me a list of labels and the blocks they should turn on and off. It is paramterized internally, so this is totally easy to do. (Should I make it user configurable too?)

 

[jjaquinta]

If you have some sample binvox files, please link to them or send them to [email protected].

I can make my own, but I\'d rather use \"live\" data from a user.

 

[Silaz]

As requested, here is my binvox file!

https://mega.co.nz/#!KU5VFRKR!enUJegjOsMBr19-6Y-v7Pn6dhc8VffPGIrhsHxXCho0

 

[jjaquinta]

Yep. Nice simple format. Got it working on some test files. Ran into some problems in how I handed large ships. But I sorted those out. Just double checked on your file, and we look like we\'re good. Download the new version and give it a try.

Here\'s the incredibly silly ship I made with Import -> Hollow -> Fill -> Paint Stripes: