So, I understand that I’m relatively new to this community, and that these suggestions may be a couple years late, but as a software engineer that enjoys writing tools, I have some suggestions that I believe would make using Asset Manager in particular, and modding in general, a lot easier :
- Change the window title when a mod is loaded to add the mod name to the title. This will assist people using multiple AM windows (which I find myself doing a lot as I’m learning how things work), as well as prevent any confusion on which mod is loaded without having to go to the menu to see which is selected.
- Add a keyboard modifier for double clicking on a value to “jump to reference”. For example, is it a dbr field? Ctrl-dbl-click and AM searches for that dbr and then opens an edit window for it. Asset field? Find the file and then open the appropriate editor for it (PFXEditor, Tex Viewer, whatever). String field? If the value starts with “tag” (case insensitive), then search all known source text files in Text_EN for a matching tag string.
- Have AM track the dbr edit windows so that instead of opening up multiple windows for the same dbr, it’ll just make the one edit window for that dbr active (I was honestly surprised to learn this wasn’t default behavior).
- Bulk editing. This would be a big deal to implement. Source issue - when working on pets, I find myself having to go through each pet file for a skill and making the same change, or a linear change. There’s already some great functionality in the array editor window, so let’s expand that. Select multiple dbrs in the same folder and bulk option becomes available if they’re all the same template. Bulk edit window would load that template and populate all the fields where the values are the same in all selected dbrs. Editing a field then edits all the dbrs concurrently : if the class is an array, then the normal array editor pops up, and when saved, all dbrs have that field set to the array results; otherwise if a numerical type, a window similar to the array editor pops up but with all dbrs listed in alphabetical order (only the order can be changed) and then the value can be set using the typical array editing buttons for numbers (including the set, increment, and increment series buttons which are oh so handy); otherwise the type is a simple one, and changing it sets that value for all selected dbrs.
- Add to the Tools menu an item for each of the other applications (for easy accessibility without having to switch to an explorer window).
I’ve found BitmapCreator to be really useful, but it could easily be expanded. Add a drop down for when a mesh is selected that has animations to set the animation being played. Allow pausing the animation, playing at varying speeds, and stepping frame by frame (or stepping a set timestep depending on how animation is implemented).
Another suggestion not tool related - exclusivity sets for skills. Right now, there is just a flag in skills to mark them as being exclusive. This is a global check. If you change that to a number (for faster comparison for lookups), now you could have all global exclusive skills on 0 (being the default), and allow branching in skills by assigning the skills that start the branches off their common required skill to the same exclusive group id.
That was a lot of suggestions, and I understand that the amount of development work going into GD is coming to a close as Crate ramps up other projects. Here’s the kicker - I’m willing to do all of this work! I’m an experienced software engineer, I’ve done mods for games for literal decades now, I’ve written popular tools for other games, and I love GD and want to see its lifespan extended as long as possible.
I’d love to hear from Crate about helping make the modding tools for GD better.