A number of extremely clever and useful utilities have been created already - EAH, the PDA Editor, the Solar System Editor, just to name a few. I wonder if any consideration has been given to creating a unified utility to edit the various YAML files, a "Parameters Editor", wherein things like enabling Station Services, tweaking weapon damage, block damage resistances, and all the various, other, commonly edited parameters could be done through a single, user-friendlier interface? While it is certainly a simple enough task to edit these, as they are, essentially, just text files*, and the majority of people who have been around for a while are plenty familiar with this, as time progresses more and more new players are going to join this community, and a convenient package that simplifies this process would certainly be of great benefit to those less familiar. Additionally this could be used to quickly back up and restore these sorts of customizations. While I do have some aptitude at creating utility programs, I lack the time and the level of familiarity with many of the values to really do this justice, and this would become a rather long-term project for me to undertake and actually do well. Any thoughts? * As I recall, and it has been quite a while since I've dabbled in making any sort of changes to these, there are some particular formatting requirements - things like "a blank space character is required in this position" or "a semi-colon is required in that position" type of format requirement, so something like this would certainly help to ensure format requirements are met automatically.
@jmcburn already made a quite comprehensive tool with his Playfield Editor, and it has a config file (ecf) editor in it, but appenrently it went completely under the radar as not a lot of players seem to even know it exists . It has been done a while ago, and he has been absent for health reasons, but no news since then (hope he's ok). He even made a blueprint visualization tool in his latest version which is pretty cool. I am not sure everything would still work, but it's always worth a try. For players who just want to edit some basic stuff like weapon damage or ROF it should do the job. https://empyriononline.com/threads/tool-empyrion-playfield-designer-v2-0-6-exp.37581/ .
Thanks for mentioning. Yeah, I'm mostly ok again (with a few ups and downs health-wise), and EPD is already in the works for V1.7. I integrated a few things already, but it's not done for release yet. There's been quite a few changes in the playfields. *Maybe* there's a chance to finish and release a semi-stable version in the weeks after christmas, as I might have a little more time then to get into the little more complicated things. As for the ECF config editor: It could work, although I did not really test it lately with V1.7, but what I noticed that some things changed. But as I said, haven't tried it lately. Blueprint Viewer: The blueprint format has changed as well, and needs some updating, but I think that will have come a little later. Need to figure out the new format first. That's a tough one. Maybe with the help of the devs it could be going a little faster , but not sure, have been away quite a while. /jmc
Have been aware of the Playfield editor, but did not realize it had a config editor as part of it - though that's probably more just me being something of a klutz with it LOL The art of fully customized this and that is just not something I've developed particularly well yet, but I'll get there!
