Drawing with chunks: Argh!

[Karlos]

Does anyone else find it slow and tedious browsing through the chunks file in Studio in order to create something new? It seems to be very poorly organized; you'll see a small cluster of related chunks together, and then you have to hunt through the rest of the file for the remaining related ones you need. Maybe the original U7 and SI creators had them organized in a matter other than numeric order when they created the game originally?

If anyone knows any tricks to make this process easier, I'd appreciate the insight. I'm currently working on a mountainous island with a cave complex under the mountains.


-Karl

[RazorBlade]

They most probably had a development kit which was easier to use; if anyone still does work on studio, he should perhaps take the design of the Aurora toolkit (neverwinter nights) into account. The maps in NWN are very similar to U7 in many aspects, most obvious is it uses a tileset.
And it has some prefabs, which really make your life easy. This would help much in studio, imagine perhaps a complete castle or a cave or a forest or something.

[SB-X]

It already has shape sets, but something like chunk sets would probably be useful. (to the people who use EStudio - I havn't had time for a while now) That would help make those really big forests. I can't see why you would want identical castles though.

[drcode]

You can create groups of chunks, too. So you could create a 'mountains' group, if that would help. The same chunk can go in multiple groups. You'll be the first one actually using this feature, so I'm sure you'll be back with a bug report or two:-)

[Karlos]

I wish I had discovered this feature earlier; it makes things much easier!

No bug reports yet, but one minor nit: When I go to the groups tab from studio and click on the group of chunks I want to work with, I would perfer that the contents of the group show-up in the chunks browser pane rather than having to double-click on the group to bring-up the group window in order to use it.



-Karl

[RazorBlade]

@SB-X

It makes sense with NWN, also it was just a (bad) example.

[Dominus]

Karl: makes sense what you say there...

[Karlos]

Okay, I've posted a few bugs in the bug tracker that are related to groups of chunks, the most annoying of which is the "remove" button removing the wrong chunk from the group.

My SourceForge username is "karlos, btw.


-Karl

[drcode]

I'll look at those tonight. (Just when I thought it was safe to look at the bug list...)

[drcode]

I can't seem to duplicate the 'move' or 'remove' bugs. Any suggestions for getting them to happen?

[Karlos]

I'm having trouble recreating the "Move" problem at the moment. For "Remove", I did a little testing, and I think it may only happen with groups that have a large number of chunks. Try creating a new group of chunks, dragging 20 or so into it, closing the group window, double-clicking on it to bring it back up, highlighting the very last chunk in the group, then hitting "Remove".

Regarding the drag-n-drop problem, I think I've figured-out what seems to cause it: if the mouse cursor ghoes over the Exult window before reaching the group window, then the drop will not work

I'll update the appropriate bug reports with this new info.


-Karl

[drcode]

Okay, I'll try it with a larger # of chunks. The most I tested with was about 10.

I've seen the drag-and-drop bug before, but forgot to fix it:-)

Before you notice, there's another bug: If you remove a chunk, then press one of the move keys, it crashes.

[Skutarth]

I prefer creamy, not chunky.

Mmmmmmm...