Creatures Editor Options

[aigleborgne]

Well, this is my new project!
This editor will allow you to easily edit creatures and generate a set of files.
These files will be processed by WEIDU macro.

It could be seen like Near Infinity Editor for Creatures. Except it will patch files, which is far better!

Example of use: you want to add "Invisibility Detection" effect for a set of creatures that should see invisibility?
You will be able to select these creatures from a list (with a checkbox system) and then click add effect. Select Invisiblity Detection and click Add.

It will be possible to change most of the things doable with Near Infinity. I will exclude some of them because I don't need them, but it will be possible to include them on a later stage.

Additionally, I will add a support for creating complex spellbooks based on schools selection or other factors.
This could be something like building a set of generic spellbooks, each one identified by a name. Then adding one to a creature and freely change some spells after this.

There will be a support for creating complex baf script.
Something like affecting a long list of baf files for one script slot. Each baf will have its own order number. When generating files, final baf name (previously set) will be created by adding together all baf.

I will release this editor if some are interested in it.
It will be done in PHP with framework CakePHP and MySQL database.

I will code this while testing it with Enhanced Creatures.
My purpose is to code Enhanced Creatures in a better developping station. So I will add features when I will need them.

I guess that in end december, I will have released both of them.

[aigleborgne]

Some quick news:
I am late on schedule. In fact, it took me some time to add autocomplete feature to my project.
I can now import nearly everything I want from game directory. But some imports are really long (more than one hour for a complete list of all cre with their name extracted from dialog). Mainly because I used WEIDU to read dialog.tlk.
But this is not so important as I can include my database with release and change import so it doesn't touch existing entries.

I will make a final touch to autocomplete tomorrow. (example can be seen there: http://jquery.bassistance.de/autocomplete/demo/)
This is better than a select list when there are many items because you can still use it as a select, but also type some characters to quickly find something.

More news coming in end week

[Tervadh]

Good to see you're making progress.

But some imports are really long (more than one hour for a complete list of all cre with their name extracted from dialog). Mainly because I used WEIDU to read dialog.tlk.

This should really be quite quick... not longer than a minute or two, if that.

CODE

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP GLOB ~^.+\.cre$~ ~override~
  PATCH_IF SOURCE_SIZE > 0x71 BEGIN
    READ_STRREF 0x8 name
    INNER_ACTION BEGIN
      APPEND_OUTER ~cre_list.csv~ ~%SOURCE_RES%,%name%~
    END
  END
BUT_ONLY

I have some code like this that will extract not just the CRE names, but just about the rest of the relevant data and put it in a spreadsheet (or database). But you may already have something similar.

[aigleborgne]

No I don't have such a thing. Originally, I have coded the exact opposite : patch a cre from a set of spreadsheets.
Concerning my imports, I don't exactly know how I will use these data.

Basically, you just update some creatures:
Pick a creature by filename, and fill forms.
Filled fields will be patched, others will left untouched.

It is not possible to use existing data from game and compare to local database to choose which ones need to be patch (because it depends on installed mods).
So retrieving existing data can be a feature at best. I will add this to my todo list because I see some interesting use.

Back to your code, I will use something like that, but I admit I am not familiar with WEIDU.
I could easily use this in tp2 file, as I did in my installation code.
But here I don't want to install anything, just run this and get results.

Is it possible to put your code into a file, input.tp2 for example.
And use a command like WEIDU < input.tp2

Thanks for your help!

Good to see you're making progress.

But some imports are really long (more than one hour for a complete list of all cre with their name extracted from dialog). Mainly because I used WEIDU to read dialog.tlk.

This should really be quite quick... not longer than a minute or two, if that.

CODE

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP GLOB ~^.+\.cre$~ ~override~
  PATCH_IF SOURCE_SIZE > 0x71 BEGIN
    READ_STRREF 0x8 name
    INNER_ACTION BEGIN
      APPEND_OUTER ~cre_list.csv~ ~%SOURCE_RES%,%name%~
    END
  END
BUT_ONLY

I have some code like this that will extract not just the CRE names, but just about the rest of the relevant data and put it in a spreadsheet (or database). But you may already have something similar.

This post has been edited by aigleborgne: Sep 28 2009, 06:38 PM