Freelancer Mod Studio - 1.2

stfx

FriendlyFire wrote:
One thing we’ve noticed which has been a little irritating is that any unrecognized parameter in an object’s block is stripped out on saving. This means we constantly need to re-add custom parameters when we use your tool.

I’ve modified it a bit in the past (thanks for sharing your sources!) but you could probably answer faster as to whether it’d be possible to keep all lines in a block regardless of whether they are recognized or not.

Yes that is under the known issues in the FAQ. Unfortunately it is not easy to change that behavior but maybe I can look into it in the future, no promises though.

The more direct, easier and suggested solution is to modify Template.xml in the directory of the .exe to include your preferred sections/entries within the ini files. This way Freelancer Mod Studio will also allow you to edit and work with them just like the vanilla ones. Though this will not work with entries which require custom sorting within a section - see first entry of known issues.

@sumanuti: Ignoring comments is actually the third entry in the known issues and is equally hard to solve. No workarounds exist for comments unfortunately.

FriendlyFire

Sounds good, I’ll give that a shot then!

Your program is definitely a breath of fresh air compared to FLE

stfx

FriendlyFire wrote:
Sounds good, I’ll give that a shot then!

Your program is definitely a breath of fresh air compared to FLE

Thanks, please let me know if that still isn’t enough to solve your issue:)

Also feel free to send me your modifications if you think they would be useful for someone else.

FriendlyFire

It’s taken me a while to actually find back the source and merge it with the latest version but I do have a series of modifications that I could hand over.

Be warned though… I’m really not proud of how hacky they are

I’ve done the following changes (some are personal preference, others new things):
-Allowed mouse look to work while moving the camera with WASD
-Reversed right mouse and ALT+left mouse mouse look
-Holding SHIFT while moving with WASD will increase the step by 10x, which makes movement faster
-Added granular object move keys: anything currently selected can be moved or rotated using the numpad. Various modifier key combinations can be used to increase or decrease the step size. This works while the focus is either in the system editor or the table editor.
-Added drop-downs for archetypes and loadouts, which are determined by scraping the solararch.ini and loadouts.ini files. I’ve made it such that it’ll work as a somewhat “autocomplete”, only showing archetypes which match what’s written in the archetype box at the moment (so “planet_” written in the box will only return archetypes starting with “planet_” ). Furthermore, loadouts are filtered such that only loadouts associated with the current archetype are displayed.
-A few misc bug fixes and workarounds.

I’ll send you a patch file momentarily. Do with it as you will

stfx

Wow, very nice, thanks a lot.

Could you maybe explain the changes in ViewCubeVisual3D.cs and DockPaneCollection.cs a bit? The first I don’t understand and I think the last one is a crash fix which I have seen once or so but I am not able to reproduce reliably and therefore understand. Maybe you have a bit more info, like which revision was the first you encountered it?

Also why are you setting the culture to en-us? Writing/parsing is done with invariant culture so it should not have any effect on those things. Is it because of your object key move changes? Because there you have double.parse without invariant culture (see Data/Parser.cs::ParseDouble)

I also wanted to allow mouse look to work while moving in fly mode but there is an issue that you speed up considerably when rotating the camera by moving the mouse while flying at the same time which I have not been able to resolve yet.

Also I just went ahead and implemented the faster fly movement using SHIFT slightly different by multiplying with whole delta instead of single step. This gives a more immediate feedback when holding down SHIFT and gives actually any feedback when releasing SHIFT.

Thanks again for your contribution

FriendlyFire

For the first one, I get three exceptions on this line every time I run the application. I tried to diagnose it (it’s saying the culture “gu” is not installed…) but couldn’t figure it out, and since the program runs fine without it I decided to put a try/catch around it just to stop the constant annoyance.

For the second one, occasionally closing one of those objects also seems to close other objects (either they’re two pointers to the same thing, or they’re inextricably tied together), such that the Count can be reduced by more than one at a time. Hence, the best iteration is to always keep i in sync with Count.

I set the culture to en-us largely to try to debug the “gu” culture thing, but I also tend to do it all the time just in case I forget to set the culture everywhere else. Having a default culture set to something standard tends to help tremendously in the case of FL, where you WANT the culture to be en-US. As someone who uses a foreign language OS where decimals are marked with “,” instead of “.”, I tend to notice issues with culture very often

For the mouse look, I think people will prefer the bug over not having the ability at all. Since the control is very first-person-like, people will expect the ability to move and mouse look at the same time, so not having that ability is very counter-intuitive, as far as I can tell.

Glad you appreciate the rest of it

stfx

FriendlyFire wrote:
For the first one, I get three exceptions on this line every time I run the application. I tried to diagnose it (it’s saying the culture “gu” is not installed…) but couldn’t figure it out, and since the program runs fine without it I decided to put a try/catch around it just to stop the constant annoyance.

Would you mind trying the following patch: https://gist.github.com/stfx/a3e9cc8f44f8731cfe69

If that does not help maybe http://stackoverflow.com/a/3978814/209649 might help fix this issue as it might be a problem with your OS.

FriendlyFire

Sadly even with the patch it still does it. The exception seems to be handled by the application (outside of the debugger I don’t notice it), but if I debug first-chance exceptions it appears systematically.

As for the SO post, I did see it, but I don’t think requiring your users to install an obscure culture that they’re never going to use is the way to go. I was just curious as to whether the problem could be fixed instead of worked around.

Bobthemanofsteel

stfx my love, the new versions of FLMS are lovely, with FF’s modifications even moreso, but still one annoyance remains.

Would it be possible to have the solararch.ini location saved into the program in some manner? Perhaps simply by a line in the options menu. It’s extremely annoying to have to go back and select it for every system, especially when the system directories are not in the vanilla filestructure.

Thanks for your work on the program, it’s made system work so much easier!

stfx

Version 1.2 is up!

Bobthemanofsteel wrote:
stfx my love, the new versions of FLMS are lovely, with FF’s modifications even moreso, but still one annoyance remains.

Haha thanks. Hopefully I was able to reduce that annoyance somewhat by allowing you to specify a default DATA path in the settings in case the DATA path can not be found relative to the opened file. This includes finding archetype file as well as model files. Thanks for the idea.

@FriendlyFire:

I was able to fix rotating the camera while flying at the same time. If I would not have been able to fix it properly I probably would not have changed it as unpredictable behavior is much worse than restricted functionality - well at least in this case I think but anyway it works now so all is good

About that strange exception, I was just assuming that you are one of the very few people in the world to have that error. And the cause seems to be the OS so I would rather not add random exception catch code just for that.

Btw I added the object move functionality probably more different than you expected but I played around with it quite a bit and decided that this was one of the better options. That aside you might be interested to see how I implemented it - also changing it to what you had is now rather easy.

Finally the code to allow choosing from archetypes/loadouts is not really usable as you already mentioned and I don’t plan on writing it properly as this would be a massive task. So it is unlikely that it will make it into the official repository - thanks for letting me see it though

@sumanuti:

Version 1.2 added support to read/write comments from/to ini files. However all comments within a section will be written at the end of that section and therefore possibly losing their context. So keep that in mind when writing comments - you can also write them from within Freelancer Mod Studio. I think this situation is much better than removing them completely - which you still can by specifying that in the application settings btw

There were some other nice additions and fixes in 1.2 so make sure to check out the changelog and re-read the FAQ before downloading the new version and playing with the source

***M.o.D.***

sweet changelog
thank you very much

now i feel the urge to build smth again

w0dk4

stfx wrote:
Hm did it also happen with ealier versions? If yes reinstalling the .NET framework 3.5 sp1 might fix your issue.

hey stfx,

so even the latest version have had the same bug on my machine, crashing when the 3d system editor is opened. I tried to debug the exact cause… however I could not really figure out the exact reason. It definately had something to do with the helix engine when first trying to actually draw something (at first I thought the dockpanel suite was to blame, but I dont think so).

Anyways, on the helix homepage I read that the target profile should be .NET 4.0 so I simply went ahead and switched all 3 projects to .NET 4.0 and now I can also use your fantastic editor

If anybody has the same issue as me, I’ve attached an updated .exe (compiled in VS 2013).

If you dont see any issues in switching to .NET 4.0 maybe you could also do that in your main release.

stfx

hey,

I am glad that you were able to fix this issue however this sounds like a problem with your .NET 3.5 install on your OS. Maybe installing .NET 3.5 SP1 might help?

Also I am using a modified version of HelixToolkit which does not need .NET 4.0 and targets .NET 3.5. The reason why I would not want to switch the framework is that .NET 3.5 is already on many machines starting with Vista by default.

Or maybe we will find out why your .NET 3.5 doesn’t like it, seeing the error message would be greatly appreciated.

If anybody else has this issue please let me know

w0dk4

Sadly there is no error message whatsoever. The debugger just closes when the error occurs. The program fails somewhere when the Show method for the 3D viewer window is called (in some weird callback hook as far as I could find out…).
When running the program without debugger it says it reached a user defined breakpoint.

It may be that its just my system though I tried uninstalling all .net stuff and reinstalling didnt fix it. Ah well, I can just compile my own binaries for the time being

Cougan

Hi stfx,

i work with your software (FL Mod Studio 1.2.0.0) since a couple of weeks . The software is very nice, but there are some little “cloudy’s” and there are no updates to be found by FLMS

Open the Delaer list and you see the keyword left side in the list. Like LI01_01. OK, this is Manhatten, but can you say adhoc what is “Iw06_01” ? If you see a chance, for customize or changes, that the modder can see the correct name? (Leiden Base). In other respects the modder has to check up every key in a List with the correct names.

The 2nd is, there are no search posibilitys. If i work with the equipment ini (verry huge) and serach a special torpedo, or something else, i have to serach by my own eys. I call this process: “electronic dataprocessing by feed”
If you see a possibility, to enhance the FLMS to support the modder with some search algorhythmen?

Best regards, and mary xmas
cougan

stfx

@w0dk4:

I see, well at least you are able to finally use Freelancer Mod Studio haha

@Cougan:

Glad that you like it.

I agree that those features would be nice to have along many many others. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to implement them.

Anyway I already thought about those two things in the past and concluded that reading/displaying the strings from the ressource dlls could not be easily done in a satisfying quality.

However I have been meaning to add a search function for the longest time so this could happen sometime in the future;)

Cougan

Hi stfx,

you right. I know this. You want to realize some cr’s in the software, and then the children need you to play with you, an the woman, too
Its ok.
But if you have time in future to realize this, let ist us know.

Mary xmas
Cougan