[suggestions][all tools]How can we improve the UI upon other things?

[GigaLem]

While NLEditor is fun to use I think there's room for improvement. This can go for all other tools too. Use this topic if want to suggest ways of making Neolemmix more convenient

I'll give my input for my suggestions

For Neolemmix Editor
I want a better way to view all the pieces, for big sets with tons of pieces, scrolling through em is a major pain! I want the piece selector to give you the option to view more pieces at once maybe even have it pop out of the editor too.

My second suggestion would be the gray boarder to always be visible no matter how much your zoom in. What I mean is that whenever I zoom in towards the edge I want to see a bit of the gray area so I know im at the end of the map, this was so useful in the old editor I would very much like it back here

Third one is something that others might find handy, and X/Y co-ordinate viewer for the objects and terrain. For those that want to be precise, having that there would be very helpful.

Fourth one would be having a tab for the backgrounds on the piece chooser, it doesn't even have to say "View Backgrounds" it could just say "Choose Background"

For the Graphic Set Tool (New format)

This one is a big one. Complete UI overhaul. The new graphics tool is too small and too buggy. you can't seem to see the full size of the objects or pieces. you have to add stuff externally because adding it internally has a bug where if you name this object and press enter, it deletes itself and renames all the objects to the one that came before it. The size of the program should be much bigger, and UI should be user friendly. Allow us to have the program auto holo out pieces that have any of that "Fushia" color you know the one. This one "R:255 G:0 B:255". Allow us to select if we want import the strip vertically or horizontally. and most importantly allow us to select lemmini resolution for any graphic sets we want to convert. and allow us to edit sound on objects that were editable in the old format (Custom sounds on switches and locked exits)

I'll add more once I use the level pack tool.

[namida]

I want a better way to view all the pieces, for big sets with tons of pieces, scrolling through em is a major pain! I want the piece selector to give you the option to view more pieces at once maybe even have it pop out of the editor too.

Would be nice, but not critical.

My second suggestion would be the gray boarder to always be visible no matter how much your zoom in. What I mean is that whenever I zoom in towards the edge I want to see a bit of the gray area so I know im at the end of the map, this was so useful in the old editor I would very much like it back here

AGREE!!!

Third one is something that others might find handy, and X/Y co-ordinate viewer for the objects and terrain. For those that want to be precise, having that there would be very helpful.

Already exists. Look carefully in the bottom-right corner of the level display.

Fourth one would be having a tab for the backgrounds on the piece chooser, it doesn't even have to say "View Backgrounds" it could just say "Choose Background"

Would be nice, but not sure if it might be too much work.

[Proxima]

Use this topic if want to suggest ways of making Neolemmix more convenient

There are good reasons why individual bugs and suggestions get their own topics. It allows discussion of each one to be separate so that important points don't get lost in a maze of crisscrossing conversations. It makes it easier for Nepster to look through the list of bugs and decide which ones to prioritise. It allows topics on fixed bugs to be moved to the "Closed" subforum to get them out of the way once they're resolved.

And finally, it's how Nepster has said he wants things to be done. It's not up to you to decide differently.

[Nepster]

Thanks for posting your suggestions. But as Proxima already said: Please make a thread for each bug or suggestion, or at least number them properly instead of using a block of text.

Regarding the editor:

1) I want a better way to view all the pieces, for big sets with tons of pieces, scrolling through em is a major pain! I want the piece selector to give you the option to view more pieces at once maybe even have it pop out of the editor too.

This was already suggested previously, but this is a pain in the a** to code. And for the most part, styles don't go beyond 60-70 pieces, which can be scrolled through reasonably fast. The only exceptions are the L2 and your styles.

2) My second suggestion would be the gray boarder to always be visible no matter how much your zoom in. What I mean is that whenever I zoom in towards the edge I want to see a bit of the gray area so I know im at the end of the map, this was so useful in the old editor I would very much like it back here.

I already tried that in the latest update - and sometimes it even works Unfortunately though, there seems to be a bug in the mouse zoom still...

3) Third one is something that others might find handy, and X/Y co-ordinate viewer for the objects and terrain. For those that want to be precise, having that there would be very helpful.

As namida said, this already exists.

4) Fourth one would be having a tab for the backgrounds on the piece chooser, it doesn't even have to say "View Backgrounds" it could just say "Choose Background".

There are two problems with that: First of all, the selections are currently tied to the selected style, so you would be able to choose only between the backgrounds of the currently selected style. But more importantly, the piece selection is extremely bad for displaying big images, which backgrounds would be. So you probably wouldn't recognize the backgrounds even if you could see them in the piece selection at the bottom.

Regarding the graphics tool: You are (almost) the first one to report bugs for it, so I am absolutely not surprised there are a lot of them there. And don't forget that I hacked these tools together within two or three days, because a few days before I wanted to release the new-formats version, IchoTolot (IIRC) complained about the lack of a pack toolkit or a graphics toolkit.

5) The new graphics tool is too small [...]. you can't seem to see the full size of the objects or pieces..

I agree that the space for objects became somewhat small, because I had to add a lot of new options to set and forgot to add additional space.
However you can display terrain pieces up to a size of 90x110 pixels. This should be more than enough - I don't think bigger terrain pieces are of any use in actual levels.

6) you have to add stuff externally because adding it internally has a bug where if you name this object and press enter, it deletes itself and renames all the objects to the one that came before it.

Actually it doesn't delete the piece. It just sorts the pieces internally according to their new names, but forgets to update the piece name list. That is the actual bug.

7) The size of the program should be much bigger, and UI should be user friendly

This alone does not tell me anything - especially the comment regarding the UI. And for what do you want to use the additional space, if the application is bigger?

8) Allow us to have the program auto holo out pieces that have any of that "Fushia" color you know the one. This one "R:255 G:0 B:255".

There are free online apps that you can use for this purpose - just google somthing like "online make background transparent". Or use a proper graphic creation tool. Given these great options, I don't feel like coding several hours just to replicate this behavior.

9) Allow us to select if we want import the strip vertically or horizontally.

There is one big problem with that: As far as I know NeoLemmix no longer supports horizontally stripped images! So implementing this would not just mean adding an additional flag in the nxmo file, but to actually modify the image itself, which I am really loath to do.

10) and most importantly allow us to select lemmini resolution for any graphic sets we want to convert.

This would mean that the graphics toolkit downsize the images. Again this a thing that actual proper graphic creation application can do a lot better!

11) and allow us to edit sound on objects that were editable in the old format (Custom sounds on switches and locked exits)

Didn't know that NeoLemmix supports custom sounds for them, but it seems it does. That's an easy change.

Overall you should view the graphics tool as something that bundles your images, creates the proper nxmo files, ... You should NOT view this as an application to modify your graphics with, because there are a lot of extremely good applications that can already do that - and do that much better than anything that I can implement myself! So please do points 8), 9) and 10) in your preffered graphic creation tool.

[Nepster]

Ok, I fixed points 6) and 11) now. And I enlarged the image area somewhat, so that you have more space for the object images, so hopefully point 5) is taken care of, too.

[namida]

This would mean that the graphics toolkit downsize the images. Again this a thing that actual proper graphic creation application can do a lot better!

Actually, I can see one huge advantage of a dedicated NeoLemmix tool here: A NeoLemmix tool understands that the object graphic is several frames, not one large image, and could seperate each individual frame, and resize them appropriately.

Understandable that this might still be too much work, especially to support different resize methods (nearest neighbour vs bilinear etc). Perhaps a middle-ground that would assist with this - mass exporting / importing single frames of an object. (Or maybe that feature already exists. I've been editing my new graphic sets by hand rather than using the tool, so I'm not 100% sure.)

[Nepster]

I really want to avoid any image modifying algorithms in the graphics tool. How many exactly double-sized images (especially with frames) are there, compared to the effort implementing all that?
But even in that regard, I would say other graphic modifcation tools are better suited, especially as one has to edit the resulting sprites by hand anyway for them to look nice and not too blurry.

[nin10doadict]

I do agree with the new format graphics tool being rather... well, awful. It's so bugged out that I basically can't use it to create a set from scratch, as something will inevitably glitch up and the set will get eaten. If I try making a set from scratch, save it, and then try closing the program and loading it again, pretty much every time I will get an error message along the lines of "Some int value cannot be null. Continue anyway? Press no to close or yes to continue." Pressing yes results in the style failing to load and I cannot edit it further. As such I would have to create the entire set in one sitting, as I cannot load it later.

I find myself using the old format graphics tool to make the set, then converting it over with the converter tool. I prefer the interface in the old version anyway; the biggest thing I would say the old version has is the ability to view any frame of the animation on an object while setting the data for it, as opposed to having it constantly animating. It makes it much easier to set the trigger areas appropriately for traps and the like when they aren't animating. The old set does have a bit more flexibility with image processing (can choose transparency, can support horizontal sprite sheets as well as vertical, and so on).

Oddly enough, sets that have gone through the converter tool load properly, and can be edited, saved, and loaded later with no issues. It only seems to be creating a set from scratch that is doomed to failure.

Overall, because the converter tool and the old set tool work well, I don't think fixing the new set tool is a high priority.

[namida]

^ Additional to that, styles (and packs, for that matter) are very easy to edit by hand, and doing so is much more flexible (especially in the case of packs - you can have a pack with no ranks and all the levels are in the main pack list; or ranks inside other ranks, etc, when editing by hand; but you're restricted to the "traditional" structure when using the toolkit). It's not like the level editor where you really need an editor in order to achieve anything meaningful in a realistic time.

[Nepster]

To all of you: Please report bugs when you encounter them!
I myself don't create graphic sets, so don't use the graphics tool and therefore don't find any of these bugs myself. So as long as you don't report any bugs or problems in general, I think everything works perfectly (or at least well enough to not annoy you). To reiterate: It is really up to you to tell me if something is not working!

If there is a general consensus that a separate graphics tool is no longer needed, then that's totally fine by me (especially as this was my original intention ) But again: Please tell me so, or I will continue to think it is used and spend time on updating it; time that can be spent better on other issues.

I do agree with the new format graphics tool being rather... well, awful. It's so bugged out that I basically can't use it to create a set from scratch, as something will inevitably glitch up and the set will get eaten. If I try making a set from scratch, save it, and then try closing the program and loading it again, pretty much every time I will get an error message along the lines of "Some int value cannot be null. Continue anyway? Press no to close or yes to continue." Pressing yes results in the style failing to load and I cannot edit it further. As such I would have to create the entire set in one sitting, as I cannot load it later.

This really sounds like a bug. But without any clue what you did there, I have no idea where even to start to reproduce this bug, find the problem in the code and fix it.

[...] the biggest thing I would say the old version has is the ability to view any frame of the animation on an object while setting the data for it, as opposed to having it constantly animating. It makes it much easier to set the trigger areas appropriately for traps and the like when they aren't animating.

Perhaps it would help, if the initial frame (i.e. the waiting frame for traps) is displayed for about three seconds before launching again in the animation? I perfer not to allow framstepping and the whole animation, as this makes the code complicated and requires ugly controls on the UI.

[namida]

Perhaps it would help, if the initial frame (i.e. the waiting frame for traps) is displayed for about three seconds before launching again in the animation? I perfer not to allow framstepping and the whole animation, as this makes the code complicated and requires ugly controls on the UI.

Generally, one would use the first frame to set a trigger area. So perhaps a single checkbox for "animate" vs "just show first frame" (or alternatively, a single play / pause button - combined with the delay before repeating the animation) is sufficient here?

(There are a few object types - most notably, single-use traps - where the second frame might be used instead. For these such objects, that frame should be shown.)

[nin10doadict]

I think I've isolated what's causing the crashes I'm experiencing with the new set tool. I'll make a separate topic detailing what I've found.

As far as the pausing after each animation cycle, I think that would be a good fix.

[Nepster]

I added pausing the animation for the triggered animations.