Freelancer Mod Studio - 1.2

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.

I got 3D editor key shortcuts to work. I used a minor workaround so that you have to click into the 3D editor before key presses are being registered which you usually do anyway.

Version 1.1.1 added special key shortcuts for the 3D editor including much improved walk-around/fly camera movement.

There are also several bug fixes and improvements in this version so be sure to check it out in the changelog!

I added the new key/mouse shortcuts and some nice workflow tricks to the FAQ to speed up your production:)

Download the latest version or use the updater in your Freelancer Mod Studio.
View the changelog
Really, read the FAQ!

Skotty. wrote:
To be honest, I really didn’t expect you would implement this

Thank you very much!

Sure, I hope you like it:) Although I think it is faster/easier to navigate using rotation around point, zoom, object focus, pan + orientation cube it also nice to fly around:)

Skotty. wrote:
For “Move camera up” Q or R is better than Space.

Hm not sure, you think so?

The gamer setup would obviously be WASD + space + shift (every finger above one button, middle finger above W+S) however shift alone does not work as it would interfere with other shift key/mouse bindings.

I was also thinking about arrow keys + page up/down but arrow keys also do not work due to limitations mentioned in a recent post.

Anyway I was indeed thinking about WASD+E(up)+Q(down) vs. WASD+SPACE(up)+E(down) but went for the SPACE version as you can use 4 fingers instead of 3 and move into multiple directions at the same time easier.