Skajaquada
Crazy Engineer
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2007
- Messages
- 134
I'd just like to share what I've figured out last week and hopefully hear some good pointers if anyone know of some nice tools or some such thing. I'm at a point in my project where I've got 198 textures, 144 units and 18 civilizations to put together, though roughly some 8 unique models, and 2987 files to set VFS to true 
The most important discovery was how the IndieStone-exporter works. It doesn't seem to generate new mesh-files but in order to make it produce a "new" unit in my ModBuddy-project I had to rename the FBX-, GR2- and ISXML-files. Leaving out any of those made it crash. Also just loading new textures and changing the name of the unit still caused it to overwrite the previously exported unit.
The first utility I found useful was the Bulk Rename Utility. It perhaps wouldn't have been necessary if I had named all my textures right the first time but after I discovered the GR2-mesh files doesn't give a damn about file-structure and just pretends all texture files are in the same folder it was good to have. I could also copy up all the IndieStone-files and load a text-file with a list of rename from the default-copy names to my civilization-names.
Then I found a real gem. The program xStarter allows you to record actions like opening programs but also entire mouse-movements. It just required some clever naming conventions and opening files by entering a key-word with CTRL + V in search-field. Then I could with relative ease put together some macro that exported all units for a civilization. Though it was really buggy and I had to keep watch so it didn't miss a button, it's really the second best thing to some IndieStone API
Finally, and ironically the thing that saved the most time considering the alternative... Around 3000 files needed VFS set to true. I simply unloaded the project, then did a find and replace of all VFS to true in the project-file. Done and done. Now I'll try to write some scripts in Photoshop to generate the textures more easily. I'll also try to write some scripts make copies in the Civ-tables and Unit-tables for all my civilizations and units.
The most important discovery was how the IndieStone-exporter works. It doesn't seem to generate new mesh-files but in order to make it produce a "new" unit in my ModBuddy-project I had to rename the FBX-, GR2- and ISXML-files. Leaving out any of those made it crash. Also just loading new textures and changing the name of the unit still caused it to overwrite the previously exported unit.
The first utility I found useful was the Bulk Rename Utility. It perhaps wouldn't have been necessary if I had named all my textures right the first time but after I discovered the GR2-mesh files doesn't give a damn about file-structure and just pretends all texture files are in the same folder it was good to have. I could also copy up all the IndieStone-files and load a text-file with a list of rename from the default-copy names to my civilization-names.
Then I found a real gem. The program xStarter allows you to record actions like opening programs but also entire mouse-movements. It just required some clever naming conventions and opening files by entering a key-word with CTRL + V in search-field. Then I could with relative ease put together some macro that exported all units for a civilization. Though it was really buggy and I had to keep watch so it didn't miss a button, it's really the second best thing to some IndieStone API
Finally, and ironically the thing that saved the most time considering the alternative... Around 3000 files needed VFS set to true. I simply unloaded the project, then did a find and replace of all VFS to true in the project-file. Done and done. Now I'll try to write some scripts in Photoshop to generate the textures more easily. I'll also try to write some scripts make copies in the Civ-tables and Unit-tables for all my civilizations and units.
