Elvas Tower: A few suggestions to increase productivity - Elvas Tower

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A few suggestions to increase productivity Rate Topic: -----

#1 User is offline   Genma Saotome 

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Posted 20 October 2017 - 05:26 PM

Goko, a few suggestions to automate actions that are presently inefficient, presented as exclusive radio button selections.

Quote

Place New
(o) Fixed horizontal rotation [0-359]
(o) Random Horizontal Rotation

The need addressed here is with the placement of lots of vegetation. Most vegetation models are cruciform -- a big X -- and are built as models w/o any rotation at all. Place a lot of them and they'll all obviously look similar in part for the lack of rotation... and with lots there are too many to rotate by hand. The choices shown above should address this issue entirely.




Quote

Put

Rotation
(0) None
(0) +90
(o) -90
(o) 180
(o) Random Rotation

Flip
(o) None
(o) Horizontal
(o) Vertical
(o) Random Flipping

The need addressed here is to deal with terrtex art that has a specific orientation, such as row crops that need to align with art in adjacent patches, especially those that are not 100% full of this art (e.g., a diagonal line from one corner to the opposite with completely different art on each side of the line). AFAIK the current version of TSRE provides for random rotation and flipping as the default. As an example, when I place this art
Attached File  soybeans.jpg (33.63K)
Number of downloads: 0
with the intent of leaving it as you see there, the random flip puts this art into the route:
Attached File  soybeans2.jpg (33.61K)
Number of downloads: 0
No rotation will fix that... so I have to select some other art and put that, then reselect the row crop and hope it doesn't flip again.

Laying out the exclusive radio buttons as I have shown above should provide for all possible combinations, including the current behavior, so it will take only one try to get it right..




Quote

Paint
Feather Width [0-nn]

I havn't notice any means to adjust the extent of feathering when painting. This radio button would provide for specifying different values (max limited to the current width of the brush minus 1 pixel.



I do hope you find these interesting enough to add to the code.

#2 User is offline   Genma Saotome 

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Posted 18 December 2017 - 02:03 PM

WRT the put function I see I can use a right mouse click to pull up a selection of various rotation settings (thank you for that) but there isn't anything I've noticed that allows me to do the same for flips. Am I just failing to find that functionality or is it still missing?

Controlling flip is essential for anything that doesn't "work" by rotation, such as the diagonal pattern seen in the last two images of the previous post.

#3 User is offline   Goku 

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Posted 18 December 2017 - 02:14 PM

Maybe it needs to be added.

#4 User is offline   Genma Saotome 

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Posted 18 December 2017 - 02:21 PM

It would be a big help. The alternative is for the route builder to create addition textures for the other flip positions. They would consume GPU RAM. It's much better to just flip the one texture around so there is no need for all the extra manual work and processing that the extra textures would require.

#5 User is offline   Goku 

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Posted 18 December 2017 - 02:33 PM

Now you can always select the patch and use mirror option.

#6 User is offline   Genma Saotome 

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Posted 19 December 2017 - 09:34 PM

I've looked around for the "mirror" option and havn't seen it. Could you direct me to where it is?

Thanks.

#7 User is offline   Goku 

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Posted 20 December 2017 - 02:26 AM

Patch properties on the left. Mirror X and Mirror Y buttons.

#8 User is offline   Genma Saotome 

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Posted 20 December 2017 - 12:19 PM

Found it, thanks.

This does support the line of thinking I expressed in another thread about the need to rethink the grouping of functions in tool windows. There is no particular reason why the flip and rotation functions are not part of the same tool window as the display of the tertex icons (nor for the cut and embankment settings to be adjacent to the tertex icons), yet what we have is four different places: the terrain tool, terrain and object tool, mouse context sensitive clicking, and the properties tool; You need three of those open to do the job instead of just one tool window whose purpose is tightly focused on the task.

Everything about the placement tool window; the context sensitive mouse functions could, perhaps, be assigned tot he mouse when the tool window is active abnd used to support quick corrections (e.g., flip x, flip Y, rotate 90L, rotate 90R), or even perhaps the full suite of settings found in the window.

For the end user, he has but once tool to open when working with tertex... all of the settings are before him as well as the art icons.

Please consider it.



Two other things if I may:

  • Being able to remove a tertex file from the display icons will be useful so long as the list of icons is limited.
  • I occasionally abort TSRE while painting tertex art. I think it happens as follows: Mouse key down, cursor movement occurring... I reach the edge of the screen and wish to shift the camera view so I can continue and so while the put function is active I twist the mouse. What occurs is almost always the same: I'm looking at the sky (just sky), with put function still executing, TSRE aborts. I have verified this by moving the camera to a sky only view and then activating the put function. Nothing happens with single mouse clicks but once I begin to "paint" across the sky the program aborts.


Yeah... an arcane problem but I thought you should know in case there is a more severe underlying problem there.

#9 User is offline   ebnertra000 

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Posted 20 December 2017 - 01:12 PM

I too have had TSRE crash when working with terrain, namely terraforming. If the cursor leaves the window for any reason while moving terrain, TSRE will crash. A nasty problem when the cursor has a habit of flying to a corner of the screen on regular occasion. Looks like a new mousepad is in order...

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