New Addons

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• Kanzuke Registered, Moderator Posts: 181

  October 2016 #2

  Tried them all out for compatibility, utility and stability.
  
  ColorMater
  No problems found, and was previously on the server. Chief reason I missed this tool was it's copy material/colour features, but I recently learned that Steve added that functionality to the default tools on reload, and the last GMod update added it natively, just on opposite keys. Still, it's a timesaver with no downsides, +1
  
  Sub Material Tool
  Just about everything I could ask for in a sub-material tool, except for area select. This looks perfect for figuring out what materials should go where on individual props, something that's painstakingly slow with E2 solutions. But for skinning an entire ship? I mean I know some people will use it for that, but you poor souls. Now that the segfault issue is pretty much dealt with, I'll finish up and release an E2 that will handle complete re-skinning, but this tool will still make an excellent complement to the E2. Plus, it dupes.
  
  Visual Clip
  Not impressed. The tool's slider for max clips spams lua errors, the help text is just plain unhelpful, the red-green holograms around the bounding box are a lazy way to represent the clip and hide the clip after it's made until the tool is moved away, and it hasn't been updated since 2013. Not to mention the functionality it's trying to apply leaves gashes in the model that let you see through it, and of course doesn't impact the physics box. I can only see this tool being useful incredibly situationally, but other than occasional error spam, can't see it doing any real harm. Maybe as a respected restricted tool.
  
  Stacker STool
  It's perfect. The default cvars are a little restrictive for the model sizes we deal with in Spacebuild, but they are fully customisable. Even just pointing it at a prop shows you it's co-ordinate centre and local directions, which alone will save me several E2 pastes. An invaluable building and prototyping tool.
  
  Total Mass Tool
  I don't see why you really want this as parenting changes the weighting of the entire ship anyway, but I can see visualising the entire contraption's mass centre coming in handy every now and then. I see no harm in adding it.
  
  Prop Resizer - Link
  Holy shit the possibilities. The options for actually creative titans (without 400 entities) this opens up... mind boggling. It does have caveats though. Although I couldn't reproduce the ominous "Bad things" with collisions on convex pieces, rapidly resizing props or spawning dupes with lots of resized and complex props could freeze my game for a second. Ideally we'd want to limit both the min/max sizes and number of props a player can resize, but that would require modifying the tool. We'd have to trust the respected's not to go ham. The VisClip tool does conflict with it by resetting the visual size on any prop you aim the tool at, so that'd need to be fixed if these tools were to exist on the same server.

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  Lambda217: oh oh i am kanzuke and i love my little pony and now i'll make all the brandonphysics myself cause i know fuckin everything because now i'll make a big pony fighter drone squad and a big fuckin portal ship and i am a fuckin idiot
• Steeveeo Registered, Administrator Posts: 849

  October 2016 #3

  ColorMater: No
  This tool is not needed. I don't know if the download limit where everything starts breaking is still a thing, but better safe than sorry? If default tools can do it without a horrendous amount of effort, I see no reason to duplicate functionality.
  
  Sub Material Tool: Yes
  If the Sub Material Tool is stable, dupes, and makes submatting things easy, then that's a definite yes.
  
  Visual Clip: No
  I see this as just another way to cheese the health calculations of cores that's not easy to work around. Considering it does nothing to the physics mesh/bounding box (and the one that does do that is amazingly crashy IIRC), and the fact that all I can really see it being used for is to make props not clip through certain places, I'm going to say No to this one.
  
  Stacker: Maybe
  Meh. This was removed from the server some time ago for reasons. Yeah, it can be replicated by PA but its a bit of a pain in the ass. That being said, all I usually ever saw Stacker being used for was making barrel snakes and stupid looking stackerships. It has it's uses, but I could go either way on this one. I'll let myself be overridden if enough people actually want this for more than the above reasons.
  
  Total Mass Tool: No
  Completely useless. Parenting overrides weighting anyway, and funny weights across child props can cause ship spazzing. I might say "yes" on a trial basis if someone can prove that if actually does anything useful to parented stuff, but as of right now I do not see any sort of need for this. Even then, I've been wanting the parenter tool to just create a simple physics mesh around the entire ship and parent to that instead, which would make this tool even more useless (however distant that future is when I actually do that).
  
  Prop Resizer: Maybe
  Oh boy, this looks like a possible nightmare to deal with, both in balance and core calculations. I might have this thrown on the Dev server and, if it proves itself useful, stable, and handles everything correctly, add it to both servers.
• Kanzuke Registered, Moderator Posts: 181

  October 2016 #4

  Steeveeo wrote:

  Stacker: Maybe

  List of reasons why the stacker is a valuable tool
  Just because it's possible to make stuff like Hob's penistitan or the Eversor with it does not make it a bad tool. It's faster, more efficient, and far more intuitive for the same purposes compared to PA.

  Precision Alignment is not an adequate substitute, even the simplest 1 prop stack takes 5 more interactions than the Stacker Tool, and often 10 more because you never get the points the right way around first time. And if you want to extend by more than one prop, you either have to spam the move entity button and wait for the ent to actually move over your shit ping or open the console, type out "pr", autocomplete to "precision_align_attachcolour_a", backspace all the way to "precision_align_", add an "st" then down arrow three times to reach "precision_align_stack_num". I've gotten quite good at the last one. Still takes way the fuck longer than the slider in Stacker's derma menu. And at least the stacker tool actually iterates towards the prop limit when you use it, cause PA doesn't. I was just making nice smooth circle things when suddenly I have 3000 props out. Not to mention all the fucken times the tool doesn't actually do what you told it to because it's a barely stable port that brandon had to 'fix' because the original author vanished 4 years ago and yet it's still the omnitool we use as an excuse to remove half the vanilla ones even though it fails to fully replicate all their functionality, not that anyone even knows how to use half of the features because there are only like two tutorial videos and they only cover the most basic stuff. as useful as pa is and as lost as i'd be without it, holy fuck it's infuriating at times

  We get by without the stacker thanks to PA, just at the cost of time and effort. Problem is, we could get by without PA as well, just for even more time and effort. Ship construction is perfectly possible with just the physgun and weld tool, you just either get janky-ass spaceships or finish them slower than we push updates to release.
  

  Steeveeo wrote:

  Prop Resizer: Maybe

  I've tested it with the core and the calculations scale fine. Balance wise, everything else already scales with volume.
  
  Meanwhile, ColorMater and Total Mass (and the submat and resizer tool somehow) are only 1 lua file each, If file limits really start becoming a problem, I'm sure we'll be looking at the gamemode with 300 or wire with 400 first.

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  Lambda217: oh oh i am kanzuke and i love my little pony and now i'll make all the brandonphysics myself cause i know fuckin everything because now i'll make a big pony fighter drone squad and a big fuckin portal ship and i am a fuckin idiot
• Alch Registered Posts: 3

  October 2016 #5

  Round 2: The struggle for VisClip...
  
  While I understand the gripe with corestats being potentially unfriendly with viscliped, the argument of it being "useful incredibly situationally" seems rather close minded. Building any sort of polygon, particularly triangles and one with harsh angles, tends to be abysmal and the frankly bootleg and convoluted approach of "well just make an invisible prop and then copy its position and then create a hologram of it then parent that to the prop and then use the holoclip tool to make it unrender part of it and then call it good." The ability to create dynamic polygons - especially triangular - is invaluable in building and while I can understand some of the potential issues proposed in the earlier responses, I think that that could easily be avoided by either fixing it, as we've done before with other things (namely AD2 & PA), finding an adequate version (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=238138995 https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=955089&s=9757ecb9646e7eddfc94381b3ef3ec90) or by simply making it a respected tool.
• Steeveeo Registered, Administrator Posts: 849

  January 2017 #6

  Added Improved Stacker to both servers. Seems to work quite well and clamps itself within reason (except for the max stack distance, but luckily it comes with convars).
  
  After many months, I have still yet to hear any actual reasons not to put this on other than my trepidation over ugly stackerships, which people make anyway without it so whatever.