Freelancer Mod Studio - 1.2

Due to the upcoming 6 year anniversary since I first started it I decided to add starworld’s requested feature. Also because I immediately liked that feature and it turns out that it indeed helps a lot to align trade lane positions/rotations which was always cumbersome.

From the FAQ: Object tracking shows info of your selected and tracked object like distance and angle between both. To track the currently selected object use “View -> Track selected” or its keyboard shortcut. To no longer track the selected object use “View -> Track selected” again.

Version 1.0.6 additionally also added selection toggling inside the 3d viewer by holding CTRL while clicking on a model.

I hope you like it

Download the latest version here or use the auto updater in your Freelancer Mod Studio.
View the changelog
Read the FAQ

3D viewer evolves into 3D editor!

After lots of hours developing this ever wanted feature I finally present object manipulation including translating, rotating and scaling.

The beauty of this one is that you manipulate them relative to their rotation, so you can move them in the direction they are facing. This allows you to move them to a specific distance from another object and also complements setting absolute values in the property grid very well. There are a few things which could be improved like automatically updating the values in the property grid while manipulating the objects, or different mouse<->rotation behavior but stuff like that will have to wait for another time.

Additionally selecting objects is now also as easy as it should have always been. If you click on system objects (stations, planets, etc.) you can actually select them through any zones. You can also select paths through zones.

I also worked on some other stuff which you can check out in the link to the changelog below

I really hope you like those changes:)

Download the latest version here or use the auto updater in your Freelancer Mod Studio.
View the complete changelog
Read the FAQ

Thanks guys, means a lot

Skotty. wrote:
You should fix the camera movement in your 3d editor. The controls are terrible. The zoom is not smooth enough. On that way I can’t get close enough to the objects for actually moving them exactly. You also should implement arrow keys for object or camera movement.
I don’t know if you ever worked with level editors like Valve’s Hammer Editor, but that are controls you can work with.

Are you talking about the steps when using mouse scroll zooming? You can hold ALT + right mouse button while moving the mouse to get smoother zoom.

Yes I could implement arrow key camera movement, I didn’t think anyone would need them but if you like them why not.

If what you are searching is some kind of walk-around camera then simply use CTRL + right mouse button to look around and CTRL + ALT + right mouse button to move forward/backward. If you zoom out more you move faster using walk-around movement and vice versa.

Please take a look at the mouse bindings in the FAQ as all this is explained there.

Btw I would not recommend using walk-around camera as it is much faster using “Focus selected”, middle-mouse to offset camera, alt + right mouse to zoom and clicking the orientation cube to orient the camera along the axis to offset the camera along it.

Or maybe I don’t get what you mean:)

Also how close do you want to get? The near-distance limit of the camera and also the zoom limit is at about the size of a player ship. No idea why you would want to get closer than that.

PS: No I didn’t work with that editor but with Unity, Maya, 3D Max and some others.

NovaII wrote:
Yea, an amazing and useful upgrade!
May you make a key which acts like Z key in Max (centers camera on selected object) next time?

“View -> Focus selected” or CTRL+F is what you are looking for (Look-at and zoom extends).

Double right mouse click looks-at the clicked object without zooming btw.

I hope this answers your question:)

starworld wrote:
No add change the distance and set the coordinates
I am waiting the next update… 8-)

Seriously, selecting objects is good!

Thanks.

Hehe, no this was indirectly solved with the implementation of position manipulation.

To set an object to a specific distance from another do the following:

• Select object A
• View -> Track selected
• Select object B
• Set rotation of object B so that it points towards object A by comparing the angles info of the tracked object (top-left in 3D editor window)
• View -> Position handles
• Move object B away/towards object A using manipulator which points towards object A (should be the blue axis-z one) until distance info of tracked object has your preferred value
• Set rotation of object B back to original values

I have added this and more workflow tricks to the FAQ so make sure to check it out:)

Skotty wrote:
Yeah okay, my mistake. I have to admit I didn’t read the FAQ. One point there I want to say: Try to design the controls as easy as possible. Don’t understand me wrong: It’s a difference between what you can do with the program and how to use the program itself.
I want to tell you that probably the controls could be more intuitive. Besides the “Focus on” method a free camera movement wouldn’t be wrong. In Hammer Editor they solved it the way you just activate it and then move around like “fly”-mode in game. The longer you press W (forward button) the faster the movement becomes. So you have the possibility to move fast or very slowly.
Of course those are just my personal experiences, but I think this is a very intuitive way of moving around a 3d scene.

I agree that better walk-around (or fly-mode as you call it) camera support would be nice to have. However today I checked the code thoroughly and it seems like it is very hard to do keyboard movement with the way the application is built. Unfortunately there is a bug in .NET which screws up focus if you have WPF controls and Winform controls in the same application. And focus is needed for keyboard movement. It works for global menu shortcuts but not for shortcuts just for the 3D editor which is a real pity.

The best solution would obviously be to change the whole application to WPF which I wanted to do since the implementation of the 3D editor. However this would require rewriting massive amount of code and there would also need to be some good/free WPF controls to replace the docking panels, property grid and listview which I have not found yet. So yea keyboard camera movement is pretty unlikely to happen due to the big amount of work it would require.

Luckily we still have walk-around mode using the mouse as written in the last post.