[WIP] DirectEdit 0.5.0

Latest version: 0.5.0 (2015/08/01)

DirectEdit is a UI mod that enhances the system editor with a simple interface for textual planet editing. This mod allows you to edit planets in the same way you would edit a .pas directly, but without the hassle of exporting and importing your system. DirectEdit also adds the capability to apply arbitrary rotations and reflections to brushes, among other operations, although some of these features are still incomplete.

With DirectEdit, you can:

• Change planet biome, radius and other parameters after editing CSG
• Delete unselectable mirrored brushes
• Obtain brush types not listed in the editor's palette
• Change brush projection and operation types
• View a planet's CSG, metal spots and landing zones in list form
• Easily duplicate planets and brushes
• Create radially symmetric maps
• Resize planets, adjusting CSG, metal and landing zones to match
• Set any planet to have asteroid-like spawn behavior

DirectEdit uses the Floating Framework mod to create movable frames. Please install this mod before use.

GitHub​

Download​

Place the com.pa.guest.DirectEdit folder from the zip file in your Planetary Annihilation/mods folder and launch PAMM to run the mod.

Please let me know about any bugs, oddities, or points of confusion. Feature requests are also welcome so long as they are possible in the PA engine.

Thanks to @cptconundrum for helping me get started with modding and to @cola_colin for UI help.

[Mod Edit - Now available on PAMM / CMM]

so...can you like...add Lava and Water???

Nope! It's not possible to change the heightmap currently. Hopefully Uber will add tools for that soon.

Can you add this directly to PAMM? I really want to try this out but I have no clue how to get to where I need to go in order to install it

Once I'm confident it's got all the features I want and is mostly bug-free, I'll put it on PAMM. In the mean time, just follow the instructions under the download link; the folder you want should be (if you're on Windows) C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\mods.

Thanks! That was a lot easier than I thought

Glad I could help. Hope you find it useful

Me too, but I think I'm gonna need a whole bunch of tutorials if I want to get good at this stuff xD

I'm planning to put together some documentation eventually, both on the forum and as tooltips or something similar in-game. In the mean time you can just mess around and see what works. Let me know if you find any bugs!

I will! And it would be a great idea to put together tutorials. Maybe until then though you could find time to either stream or something so people can learn what to do. Right now I don't even know how to use csg with it...

This tool is amazing, with a little trial and error it really helps one understand how the .pas is structured

I think I'm really getting the hang of this!

My god.

wat i do

Literally just crashed again ******* around lol.

Trying to figure out what different figures do. Some guidance would be very much appreciated.

I just realised that scale is scale. I laughed.

Edit: My dream home..

Sometimes the planet is duplicated when i change the settings.


You need to write the edited data two times to get it saved.

You should also write
Scale x
Scale y
Scale z

Position x
Position y
Position z

I figured it out because i'm used to the xyz order in options but it may not be obvious for a beginner.


Also, when you change values in multiple lines, then switch to an other csg, sometimes some of them are not temporarily saved if you come back to the previous csg you edited.


Not a mod bug but does anyone know why the top part of metal_structure_02 is not bant and seems to have articulated joints at the edges of its squares. You can see metal_structure_12 on the left which is properly bent.

It wasn't. I figured it out because I've heard of XYZ and fiddled about ^^

With the xyz manipulation you can do very large plateaus and not absurdly tall. Yesterday i wished for this option and i got it with this mod

I know I'm currently stretching metal biomes to make a cityscape.

Being able to group/label CSG in the DirectEdit list would be good, @guest1

@superouman Thanks for the report! This is useful information.

My overwrite function doesn't seem to delete planets that haven't been fully visualized yet. Dunno why but I will fix this.

KnockOut doesn't sync variables to input fields until you tab out or otherwise exit the field. I'll try to find a way to save variables whenever a field loses focus (e.g. at the start of a click event).

Will do. Thanks!

This is the same issue as before where you need to tab out of a field before it updates fully.

You can see from the wireframe that metal_structure_02 is very low-poly compared to metal_structure_12. Although brushes may be deformed by their projection on the terrain, the edges of each poly will always be straight.

Yeah, definitely. I had a really complicated plan for how I wanted to do this with groups you could nest inside one another, but I've scrapped that idea since it would make it difficult to recover the original order of brushes, which is important.

I will be implementing the ability to select multiple brushes at a time with shift and control; selected brushes will also be highlighted in the list, so you know what you're working with.

Regarding labels - how would people feel about being able to set a color patch that would appear to the left of a brush? The other option I'm considering is a text label for each brush, which would clutter the UI a bit more.