I'm undecided on adding that, since it kills compatibility with many tools. Its very tempting to add a 'STRx' section to the file with 32bit string indices, for comments / location names / switch names / etc; but no matter how clear any compatibility warning is, my experience has always been that it would get ignored and then complained about.

It also means that any trigger plugins for scmdraft would need to be updated to work with the second string table. Or I need to unify the two string tables on map load, and split them up again during save, + change all the string indices in the data as it is being saved.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 3 2018, 11:04 pm by Suicidal Insanity.

And this is why we can't have nice things: because people can't read plain and simple warnings.

Ya, I may be able to work around the plugin problem by just recalculating all indices before launching and after it closes, but compatibility with other tools will remain an issue.


In other news, the next build should skip unit indices for hanger units .... very important features ! At least for carriers and reavers. I don't think vulture mines use unit slots, do they?

I don't think spider mines exist as units until they're placed, though I could be wrong.

The ability to save string space on comments/location names/etc is well worth the complaints of incompatibility. I will spread the word and personally deal with every person who doesn't read the warning carefully enough to understand it, so you won't have to do anything. Please add this feature in.

Spider mines are NOT sub-units, so they don't exist until placed.

Spider mines, scarabs / interceptors, and nuclear missiles all behave differently, when conceptually they could use the same system. Frustrating. Nuclear missile is actually a unit that is detectable in it's hangar when it exists (spider mines aren't), but IIRC there's no way to pre-place a silo with a nuke inside it.

Low priority suggestion: Could SCMD have a "dark theme" similar to that of Microsoft Visual Studio? (Change all the whites to grey/black, make text white) I have to do most of my mapping late-night, and its giving me a bit of eyestrain.

If an AI has a script with start_town (maybe start_areatown as well) they will automatically make a nuke in every nuke silo they own. Actually they might not even require an active aiscript. You can use this to preload the silos if you don't need them at map start.

What tools we are talking about in particular? I can't name anything much more than StarEdit? The approach here might be to "convert" triggers into an extended format - a user-initiated action. Once that done all eXtriggers are stored separately. On map save that is being compiled into the real triggers. On the map load there is a check that compiles eXtriggers and compares the result towards triggers stored in the map (must be identical). If the comparison is negative then triggers have been modified outside - display a warning like: "This map uses SCMD eXtriggers format. Map triggers have been modified by an external program that doesn't support eXtriggers. By continuing you acknowledge that all external modifications will be lost. [Confirm]".


Ah that is really nice thing. Many modern programs (discord, twitch, etc.) have a choice between light and dark themes. But probably it's one of those not so fun things to do.

What would help with regards to strings, is if you could concatenate two Comments inside a trigger into 1 when displaying in the classic trigger list.

I have a fair number of comments that are along the lines of "Detect Dark Templar at Zone X", where X can be a number from 1 to 7. This ends up using 7 strings, as well as taking up a lot of character space, just so the final character can differ. I also have several different triggers that end with the suffix "Zone Y".

So if I could split these string up to be "Detect Dark Templar at Zone" and then a separate suffix string "Y" I could save quite a bit of string and character space.

Right now I've compromised and changed the string to "Detect Dark Templar at Zone 1-7", and end up re-using this string for each block of triggers, so I just have to visually eye-ball that I'm looking at the triggers for zone 4 based on its location within the trigger list.

Just displaying the contents of all comments, potentially with line breaks could work. I'll add it to the ideas list for trigedit.

An extra theme really isn't feasible due to the amount of work involved. It should use window color settings for most of the UI, so that may work.


Uploaded a new build with a fix for a sprites properties UI bug, and internal changes to trigger rendering. Almost done splitting trigger data and trigger UI. Then I can start really working on the UI improvements.

Couple of bugs that have been annoying me:
- In terrain editing, when using Rectangular, no matter what you select from the terrain palette, it just draws Null tiles. I think this has been broken for a while. I've been working around it by copying and pasting from other maps or from elsewhere in my map when I need a specific terrain.
- When editing trigger comments, if there is a string already present, opening the string up to edit it and deleting everything and pressing 'ok' doesn't delete the string, instead it retains the old value. The best you can do is to replace the content with a single space, or to delete the comment action entirely and make a new one.

UI suggestions:
- When editing actions / conditions, instead of having to double-click to open the new window where you can then click on the elements to edit them, it would be nice if you could do a single click from the list to begin with. First click will highlight the row (as per now), and then a second click on the highlighted row on an element will allow that element to be edited. You may only need the other dialog when adding new actions/conditions to a trigger? This would mean a lot less clicking, especially if you have to edit multiple actions.
- An ability to select multiple actions or conditions at once, and iif they are the same action type, then update all fields across all of the actions simultaneously. It's annoying if you have a trigger that creates a certain number of units at multiple different locations, and you want to change the unit type or the number of units, having to click click click click on each action 1 by 1 to change all the content. Depending on what the changes are, I sometimes just delete all of the actions, make a new one and then copy it.

Rectangular draws correctly for me.

Looks like the resource position was finally fixed with this update. Thanks for that.

Can't reproduce that one. Are you getting any errors in the console or output log? There was one build where it left every second row in X blank, for larger brushes.

Will take a look.

That is already on my idea list, and some of the changes I have been doing are meant to enable support for that, but it will depend on how well it works in practice though.




No promises on that one ...

E: Cant repro the text editor issue either. Did notice it displays "<Error>" for empty strings instead of skipping them, that is fixed.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 6 2018, 11:00 pm by Suicidal Insanity.

I have ran into this one before. If you start with tilset index for terrain and shift to rectangle it will place null tiles. If you select the terrain in the action menu it will still be null. You have to close and reopen the terrain window and select rectangle from the dropdown box and select one of the options from there.

In unit settings, unticking 'use defaults' erases all data.

That is normal if you open a map made in 0.8.0 - that had initialized the settings to 0. It should not happen if you open a new map - that restores the previous set custom data, and if none was ever entered it is initialized to defaults.

ok

That works fine for me, or I am not doing it in the exact order as you are.

Can't disable trigger actions anymore.

Fixed. Also spent way too much time cleaning up trigger parameter handling, soon I can support morphing actions and the UI will persist the last selected value for every different type of parameter until it is closed. Yaaaay ;(