Tile editor improvements

from Elemental Forums

So I tried my hand around the tile editor and some little issues showed up.  First particle sources seem to be messed up and their effects render behind all other geometry in the scene apart from the ground, so they end looking odd.

Now secondly and most important I must admit I found myself quite frustrated with the fact there's no numerical interface to input settings, only sliders which I must admit, while smart on snaps are still a pain to use. So I suggest numerical type-ins for XYZ position, XYZ rotation and animation rates.

 

This would ease up precisie alignment of objects and rotations a lot, and perhaps if the devs are feeling generous we could also have a shift pivot option. This would greatly help assembling circular arrays and creating nifty animations, however I don't know if this is feasible at the moment since it means embeding more data at the tiles XMLs.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

This would indeed make things much easier to work with. What do you mean by "shift pivot" though? Like, hold shift and click somewhere to make the model face that way? That would be very nice as well, though I suppose maybe harder to implement.


Another thing that needs changing is that you can't move stuff around after you've placed it. At best, you can fiddle with it's offset, but that's difficult to use, especially with the sliders, and it's not exactly precise.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Nope, I mean, 3d objects have pivot points which set their XYZ position but also are the point which the rotate around. If the pivot point can be shifted away from the object's center you can have it spin around the pivot point.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I think they need numerical values for movements.

 

You can at the moment use the mouse wheel for fine tuning.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Rune_74, reply 3
I think they need numerical values for movements.

 

You can at the moment use the mouse wheel for fine tuning.
End of Rune_74's quote

 

Yeah the mouse wheel can help with fine tuning, however it still moves in steps too large at times. The whole XYZ translation moves on very small steps, while when you are intially plopping an object the placement is completely free. This renders some objects unalignable unless you replop them.

 

EDIT: quotepwn.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Now secondly and most important I must admit I found myself quite frustrated with the fact there's no numerical interface to input settings, only sliders which I must admit, while smart on snaps are still a pain to use. So I suggest numerical type-ins for XYZ position, XYZ rotation and animation rates.

This would ease up precisie alignment of objects and rotations a lot, and perhaps if the devs are feeling generous we could also have a shift pivot option. This would greatly help assembling circular arrays and creating nifty animations, however I don't know if this is feasible at the moment since it means embeding more data at the tiles XMLs.
End of quote

This is my biggest pet peeve about the tile editor.  There is no fine tuning of the XYZ position.  Rotation can be adjusted in the options, but it only seems to work once.  Even a "snap to" hot key would be nice to connect objects.

From my understanding, people are modifying the XML directly, but that seems a bit tedious when there is a perfectly wonderful tile editor implemented.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

A Copy and or Save as Option would be ideal as well.

If I create a 3-peice (wall segment for example), I should be able to both select the 3 and Save that as an NEW Object for use later on or copy it whole for use immediately.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Yeah, object libraries would also be very useful. Also is it just me or elemental could also use a Hue-saturation-value color picker? RGB color picking is awful