World Editor News

My id is 101163. I disabled all mods expect the map that I was trying to make timetrial for. I hope we can find a solution because there are a lot of maps in need of timetrials and race tool is a godsent after all that placing yellow bubbles and packing prefabs

 

It would be great if a layer system like that used in GIS software could be added to the world editor. Ideally you would then have either pngs or tiffs overlaid on your terrain. It would make using the forest brush, and road creation a lot easier. However, I'm pretty new to the world editor, so I'm not sure if this is already possible.

 

Devs, if you tell users to not use the 1.0 editor and give it a whole warning on why to not use it, could we at least have all of the basic tools working?
I wanted to paint some foliage, but the add/delete foliage meshes button wasnt working. All it did was print to console, driving me crazy. So I went and checked and...

Code:

           if editor.uiIconImageButton(editor.icons.forest_add_brushelement, tabIconSize, nil, nil, nil, "addNewMeshIcon", nil) then
              print("Add New Mesh")
            end

Code:

            if editor.uiIconImageButton(editor.icons.forest_delete_selected, tabIconSize, nil, nil, nil, "deleteSelectedMeshIcon", nil) then
              print("Delete Selected Mesh")
            end
            im.tooltip("Delete Selected")

Its not even coded in... the basic requirement to paint foliage (something every map creator does) is not even in the public build of the game. Come on, this editor is currently the most unstable and buggy DCC I have used yet.

 

I was contemplating posting this because it felt 'whiny' but since now I know im not the only one very annoyed with this new editor...
I decided to open up notepad with beamng and work for 3 hours. Every time it had a bug, crashed, ran slow, I wrote it down:

Code:

Reload map: Commonly CTD after entering editor and moving camera. line 104 | core//jobsystem.lua
Reload Map: Sometimes crashes on just loading the level. line 187 | Server/Server.lua
Terrain Painter: CTD if terrain is deleted but terrain painter window is open, but only sometimes. Delete -> Terrain editor -> CTD
16Bit PNG: Broken AF, just noisy and unrecognizable but the same png in 8bit works. (Possibly related to 16bit images from Nuke?)
Terrain Painter: Dual materials appear sometimes, both in the material library and in the painting selection.
Terrain Painter: Doesnt allow you to set material settings/textures in a new layer, just does not save sometimes. Works in 1.0.
Terrain Painter: |PERFORMANCE| Basic painting is insanely slow even on brush sizes of 10, 1-2 second lockup each click/drag
Model Import: Sometime makes materials, sometimes it just refuses and "no-texture"s, cant figure out a pattern.
Asset Browser: If asset browser is open and a folder/asset is created/added externally, it will sometimes not display until level reload. (Am I missing a reload button?)
General Materials: Mesh has material assigned, selecting it shows the material in the material editor with textures and all, NO-TEXTURE on mesh still. Must restart whole game
General Tools: Cant set the sliders manually anymore, if I want 10 brush size I gotta drop my mouse sensitivity
Terrain Painter: Sometimes adding a material to your editor library just doesnt work... mash mash mash the + and nothing happens. deleting it sure does work though :)
Forrest Editor: Add new mesh, doesnt work. Add new group, doesnt work. The whole thing just... doesnt work. editor/forestEditor.lua 466 | attempt to index field 'forestBrushElementNames' (a nil value)

Coming from maya, im used to bugs. It happens, I get it. But its rare that I hit so many so often and each one actively BLOCKS progress until figuring out the really weird way of getting around it... assuming the old way even works at all.

Fun fact, you can not create a terrain in 1.0 anymore, sometimes you cant even save terrain edits in 1.0. It will let you, you will see the terrain in your viewport, a file will be created. But that .ter file is full of NULL... its a lieeeee. Creating a terrain and usually editing it MUST be 2.0, so I hope that function works and is coded well... That was a fun thing to smash my head over for an entire day.

Sorry if this is kinda harsh and ramble, this is just truly really annoying as a mod developer. Lacking docs, buggy tools, completely missing tools, or requirements that just make no sense basically sums up my modding experience right now.

 

Have the devs thought about something like a special 'mod dev' branch or something where the updates to the editor may be a bit more raw, but at least it will be more often then once every 4-5 months? Like right now I have to wait till 0.23 to be able to do any forest stuff, assuming it is implemented then, which is months off and assumes that implementation isnt buggy itself.

 

Thanks so much !

 

I'm unable to edit the materials used on West Coast USA, whenever I double click a terrain material to open the inspector the world editor UI flickers once and I get a huge error message in the console:





I'm not sure if this is an issue with the map since this works on other maps, but I figured I'll post it here since it's only an issue with the new editor (the old editor works fine).

Update:
Found the issue! The new editor cannot handle a normal (to a mesh mapping) material and a terrain material inside the same file!

 

I read something in the Torque3d manual, I was reading it to gain more knowledge and happen to see this is at the bottom of the page if its hard to read. "NOTE: You MUST press the Enter key after typing the material name BEFORE clicking the Save Material button or the material will not be properly saved."
I would think that was something that applied to the old world editor 1.0 but not certain.
Got to spell check , I messed that message all up... fixed now.
--- Post updated ---

Appreciate seeing this. thanks
--- Post updated ---
Can someone share the link to known issues, if I come across something I can see what's already been reported. Thanks !

 

It's the material file in west_coast_usa/art/terrain. The specific material that causes the issue is the "backdrop" material.
Since the "backdrop" and the other terrain materials are stored in there, you should be able to simply load up the map and then try to open a terrain material using the terrain painter.
I fixed it by simply moving the "backdrop" material to a separate backdrop.materials.json file and leaving the terrain materials in their main.materials.json file.

 

Just a quick question: Will the new editor have a feature like the old one, where you can auto paint the terrain under certain parameters like elevation and slope?
Really loved using it back in the day

 

This new thing is not saving with great reliability when I'm using material editor.

For example, if I set Alpha blend on and use AlphaBlend option LerpAlpha, then save my material, I get nothing to main.materials.json or maybe I get transluencyn, but I definitely don't get any mentioning about LerpAlpha.

With 22.0.2 I got even less, nothing was usually saved, with 22.0.3 I get bit more, but it's still too unreliable to be used.

Can't access old editor either it seems and reading older posts I see there was reasons for that, but this material editing might need more reliability.

This should have Alpha Blend box checked and AlphaBlendMode is set to LerpAlpha, material has been saved, it should appear there near Translucent, but nothing appears. Usually I set materials, I play my AC Imola conversion, then play some other map and when I return to play Imola, I do all material settings again as settings don't stick.

Code:

 "imola1_bbGrass": {
    "name": "imola1_bbGrass",
    "mapTo": "bbGrass",
    "class": "Material",
    "persistentId": "1e573b1e-d4a0-494f-9d2f-db813ee622f1",
    "Stages": [
      {
        "colorMap": "/levels/imola/art/shapes/visual_track/bbgrass3",
        "diffuseColor": [
          1,
          1,
          1,
          0.689029992
        ]
      },
      {},
      {},
      {}
    ],
    "order_simset": 0,
    "translucent": true
  },

Good part is that I can import FULL Targa Florio as well as Nordschleife AND Imola from AC as single huge objects and this new thing is not going to crash, then I just click eye icon on which I want to play or all of them at once, so in theory you can build huge worlds, if editor would just save those lines to main.materials.json in reliable manner.

Also another bit is that if you use scrollwheel to scroll panels up and down, when you are in material editor, open texture, then use scroll wheel, it can deactivate your selected object, there is option to avoid that, but I had bad luck with that in 22.0.2 at least, because object without material crashed the game, might work now in 22.0.3, just got new version from Humble, so I try and see if it improves things.

List of magic words to write into main.materials.json in case material editor fails to write, would be handy, if they could pop up with ctrl+click to material editor labels, like that AlphaClip, but might be more sane to fix saving to be more reliable of course.

 

Right, with more testing with 22.3 game version I have found out some things, that of course might not be present in next game version already, but meh I document my findings here anyway, deleting is easier than knowing unknown...

Visibility setting via Eye icon.
-have visibility on for two TSStatic objects, select one of TSStatic objects, then click eye icon of the another, without changing selection and you get visibility to be disabled on both of them.
--Excepted behavior is to have visibility to be disabled only for object you click eye icon on, which is not what happens, instead above described effect happens.
///////

Informational messages that I miss.

-When I brightly decide to import .dae model with 5000 objects to be TSStatic object by placing it into maps mesh folder, then drag it onto map, information that this is way beyond supported capability of TSStatic object importing could be MsgBox as it is kinda easy to miss such information, in fact I have only once seen message that my import contained over 2000 subobjects and rest will be truncated or something along those lines.


/////////


My main.materials.json not saving issue might have something to do with importing too many subojects in single .dae file to TSStatic object, but also I get issues even with less numerous subobjects, it is like if sometimes software would reimport everything to main.materials.json overwriting all the hours of adjustments I have made, so I tend to copy main.materials.json to safety and replace it back when that happens.
Manually choosing when to import materials/generate main.materials.json would be nice.

Also some dialog where I can set import/generate defaults would be nice so that if I would like to have anistropic on and alpha clip 106 and checked for each subobject of said .dae import, that would save me hours quite quickly.

//////////

Save material, save all materials buttons

-I click save material icon and it does nothing, no error sound, not anything at all, sometimes you can't save current material, you have to save all materials.
-- In good old times, icons did gray out when not possible to be used, these days there is only grayed out everything, so could it be at least blacked out when it is not going to be working? Technically it probably is meant to disappear when it is not available, but it does not, save current material icon tricks me clicking on it even it is not going to do anything.

////////////
Most amusingly I had some 2D trees to show up with textures and all (Just single TSStatic with 640 2D planes, only two materials) just fine, even they did not have any material definition, they were oddly transparent though.
In material editor they did show up as no texture, I click arrow on a box where texture names should reside and whole game did crash reliably.
Manually adding those two materials to main.materials.json did fix the issue, maybe even add new material button would of, but interestingly there seem to be something crashing whole game if TSStatic has no material and you try to access material selection box.
Said TSStatic should be selected before launching material editor for this to happen.

///////

No matter what, AlphaBlend options seems not to get saved even with 22.3 game version.

Although sometimes AlphaTest:true is what appears, also Alpharef value, but then again I have had numerous of times, more often actually, that when I load the map there is no checkmark in AlphaClip box and no value set.

AlphaBlend however, that seems to remain none most often, it is very rare to get it to stick.

Crazy part of this is that it might stick fine, then I load another map, then return to original map I was editing and everything is reset back to default import settings, even it was written to main.materials.json just fine. Might be related to Issue #3 of this list.

I can sometimes close game and return to map and transparenty settings are fine, then I load another map and poof everything gets reset to defaults again when returning to edit the original map in question.

Also when I export new .dae it might cause some of this to happen, it is almost like a witchcraft, sometimes my hour of work on material settings just gets wiped out, but even more so, these transparency settings are not very often get saved.
I wonder if it has something to do with many subobjects in TSStatic, I have attempted to stay below 2000 objects for now, preferrably staying under 1000 if possible, but maybe I'm still pushing capabilities of this bit too far and I should stay in 100 subobjects or less?


////////
I might provide more facepalming to readers when I remember more of the issues I have had.

Generally it is very difficult to use this UI without colors in icons though, also when I choose create new object, it really took me almost a minute to realize that there are now more of those gray icons that all look like each other which I have lot of difficult to tell what they are for, but this might be more of my personal issue with my poor eyesight and all that.

Although even GIMP has returned colorful icon theme back and generally I think that in UX flat is becoming less flat and colors are becoming back in future, I hope it is very near future as this modern flat gray UI theme is super difficult to use for me, I can't remember where it was, I can remember what colors there was, I guess that is why.

Anyway performance of new editor is really impressive and while I have worked only with huge TSSTatic objects, most of the time everything is working fine.

That is way too much text, sorry about that, but I thought it might be useful to see user experience like this.

 

Okay, I got again situation where absolutely nothing was saved into main.materials.json

It seems to be happening when I start new map, then go to editor and drag and drop few .dae files to map, then go to material editor and while in editor changes happen and editor behaves like save button would actually save, nothing gets actually written to main.materials.json

So when .dae file is imported, save the map, exit the game, return to editing and after that changes are written to main.materials.json normally.


///////
Another thing with the eye icon is that when I hide terrain by clicking the icon, save the level, then exit game and run game again, load the map and terrain is visible, even though eye icon is showing line over it, so somehow hiding the terrain is not working when you load game again.
I think this can happen with other objects than terrain too, I have had it happen with some static objects, but odd thing is sometimes it does work.
Perhaps it is related to #1 of this post, maybe bringing new .dae files right after auto import/generate of materials just makes something go off.