Exult Forum

I was playing around with Exult Studio and thought of something that would make map building much easier. It gets tiresome having to scroll down through all the chunks, looking for all the river chunks, or mountain chunks, etc... and I know you can move the order chunks are shown with the button but even that is tiresome and slow. It would be much easier if it could be implemented where you can group chunks, like say an option in the right click menu to flag the chunk to be in the "mountain group", or "water group", or whatever custom groups the user needs. This would take a huge amount of hassle out of map building. Any way that could be done, or am I totally missing something I should know about already?

Ive been bothering the team for this almost as long as Ive been doing TFL

Not at all familiar with the ES code so Im unsure whether it can be done.

Wizardry dragon

From the html documentation that comes with Studio:

"3.5. Groups files

Editing a game can become quite cumbersome when you have to choose between a lot of shape files containing several frames. To make this task easier we have implemented so called groups to groups several shapes together. For example you can group all shapes containing door frames together in a group called 'doors'.
For this you have to select Groups and create a new group by writing the name in the lower part of the window and then click 'add'. You now have the option in the Shape Menu to add a shape to this group."

yes, you can group chunks into whatever kinds of groups you want. yes, it takes a bit of time - but in the end you have them grouped into the groups that you want them in, placed in whatever order makes sense to you. this was one of the first things I started to do when I began working on a new map... and you don't need to do it all at once - I was working on some grasslands, so I stuck all the grassy areas in one group. I was working on forests, so I grouped all the forest chunks together... I was working on a more lightly forested area so I grouped all of the less dense forest chunks in with some of the grassy ones... etc...

In hindsight, I actually wish I would have avoided using chunks with more than a ground texture in favor of detailing with combos which are much more versatile. It would have meant recreating a lot of the chunks with a combination of chunks of ground texture then making combos to go over them.. but then I would not need to worry about changing a shape on one chunk affecting every chunk of that number which would, among other things, make my lumberjack NPCs much more interesting.

Shapes can be grouped, not chunks, unless it's been added since my admittedly-outdated snapshot.

Wizardry dragon

I know you can if you manually sort the chunks by the move button, its just too bad you can't do it easier.

The ability to group chunks has been there for years.

browse chunks
select Groups tab
at the bottom, add an appropriate name in the field
click on Add
then you can right click on a chunk and Add to Group...

Sorting the chunks manually isn't very good because it rewrites the chunks file and changes the map to accommodate for this too. It is better to make chunk groups, as Malignant Manor describes.