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Warlander

DeedPlanner poll

DeedPlanner poll  

48 members have voted

This poll is closed to new votes
  1. 1. How do you rate current DeedPlanner interface?

    • Usable, but takes time to get used to
    • Difficult to use, requires major improvements
    • Very difficult to use, should be made from scratch
      0
    • Good enough, but could use some improvements
    • Very good, doesn't require any major changes
  2. 2. Which of these features would be MOST IMPORTANT to you?

    • Graphics improvements
    • 3d editing
    • Web browser version
    • Placing objects on furniture
    • Ability to add custom models/textures into the program
    • Ability to use more than one camera at once (for example, 2d and 3d view at the same time)
  3. 3. Which of these features are important to you? (including one from question above)

    • Graphics improvements
    • 3d editing
    • Web browser version
    • Placing objects on furniture
    • Ability to add custom models/textures into the program
    • Ability to use more than one camera at once (for example, 2d and 3d view at the same time)

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  • Poll closed on 20/12/18 at 22:59

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Hello everyone, small poll about DeedPlanner here.

 

I'm thinking about porting the entire application into the different engine (Unity), to allow me to do things that would be either impossible or difficult to add right now. What are your opinions about this, do you think it's needed? Maybe current iteration of DeedPlanner is good enough for all tasks it's meant to do and no such change is necessary?

 

"Ability to add custom models/textures into the program" mentioned in poll is something that currently exists in the program, but I'm thinking about removing it in 3.0 to make the development more streamlined.

 

There can be only three questions in forum polls, so I decided to put the ones I think are most important there, but please feel free to ask any questions or give opinions in this thread! :)

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Just to note - a lot of people mentioned that something in the interface could use improvements - what are the least intuitive things or ones that could be improved? :)

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For me it's height changing that is hardest to use. If it was possible to change corner heights in 3d mode that would be a big improvement.

  • Like 8

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I'd love to see more object models, although this might be complicated... Other than that, I don't see much requirements. Worked quite easily over the last weekend and it was my first time using it :)

 

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First of all, THANK YOU for building and maintaining this tool!   I feel fortunate to have been able to use it just the way it is.  Really I couldn't ever have built anything at all ambitious without it.  That having been said, I do find working with heights to be difficult and I make a lot of mistakes when doing it, but I don't have any positive suggestion for how to make it better.   And rendering closer to the real in-game look (which can never be exact) would be nice, including shadows and being able to render for different times of day.

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8 hours ago, Explora said:

For me it's height changing that is hardest to use. If it was possible to change corner heights in 3d mode that would be a big improvement.

 

This

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How do you see ability to edit heights in 3d, possibility to select multiple points to operate on larger area at once in addition to being able to grab some handle on a terrain and move it up/down to modify heights - like in 3d modeling applications, but simpler?

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My major difficulty with the Deed Planner is still the editing of caves and mines. Now we have such amazing possibilities with them in-game but I can not replicate them properly in the deed planner.

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Well, I wish I hadn't read this while half asleep. I thought the 2nd question was "What feature would be less important to you?" I voted web version... My correct answers after re-reading -

2: Most important - 2 cameras

3: Important - 3d editing

 

I mostly struggle with the terraforming within deedplanner granted I haven't spent much time looking into it. Everything else is very simple and can be understood in a second of looking at it, terraforming however I feel like I have to spend a lot more time trying to figure out and a lot of trial and error. It's a feature I'd love to use but dont :( 

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It took a minute to get used to and the cave height vs size thing could use a bit better explanation. Also it seems a little wonky about which is selected and which it modifies when first switching to height in a cave layer; I always toggle it once now to get it in the correct mode for sure. Once you sort it out the grid system is nice although the color stuff is not that clear. Maybe a man file or some tool tips? I couldn't find any docs and just had to sort it all out by trial and hilarious error. Once I did there is nothing I couldn't do with it and actually surprisingly easily. 

 

Terraforming could probably use some work on smoothing or distributing heights. I still don't get how the smooth height radio button is meant to work or if it even works at all. If it had an option to work similarly to flatten_border where it distributed corners that would be something we are already fairly used to. Better still to smooth along a long line of points or select and drag to distort a mesh in 3d or even in a 2d height map view. Its really easy to create blocky terraces and plateaus but it sometimes feels like to create any sort of flowing natural like terrain is more work than doing it in game.

 

-1 for unity. Please no, ever, for anything. PLEASE?

 

Really awesome tool though. I haven't cracked out on anything the way I did when I realized it wasn't just housecalc anymore.

 

Oh and is there any reason I can't set my fps lower than 30? I don't even play the real game that high. It makes my keyboard all hot and I have to suspend the process whenever I alt-tab

Edited by CreZ

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So far it seems like 3d editing would be a highest priority, with multiple camera support being second, so I would focus on these two first. Placing objects on furniture also seems more popular than I expected and would need to be planned for.

 

Graphics improvements seem to be much less popular than I expected they would be, so I probably won't be spending much time on these. Day/night cycle, lightning and pretty water are must-haves, through.

 

From web version and adding custom models/textures, first of these options seem to be more in demand. Adding both of these features at once would require huge time investment, so it's likely that adding custom models/textures will be removed, at least in the beginning.

 

Web version would be identical in most aspects to desktop version, so it would be matter of preference between better performance of desktop or convenience of web version. I'm guessing most people will want to use web to see other players deeds and desktop to plan deeds, but both versions will be capable of doing all of that.

 

7 minutes ago, CreZ said:

-1 for unity. Please no, ever, for anything. PLEASE?

 

Why? :)

Personally I have much more experience with Unity than with UE4, so it's my first choice for projects like this. I'm sure performance will go up even with graphical improvements, currently DeedPlanner uses rather crude rendering techniques that work good enough for small maps, but are problematic when number of walls/objects on screen go up.

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3d editing of terrain height would be awesome. Please make it so editing the terrain works similar to in game or maybe every click on a tile corner can raise or lower it by x amount. Allow us to see the slopes of the tile borders in 3d. Maybe a tool that allows you to select multiple tile corners to raise/lower them all by x amout with a click.

 

For multistory housing it can be so you hover over a tile border and click to place a wall or hover over a tile to place a floor. I can see some challenges with how to highlight the 2nd story floor tile in 3d. Maybe make it similar to how it is in game ... i dont know.

 

Anyway, thanks for all the hard work you put in on this!

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2 hours ago, CreZ said:

Oh and is there any reason I can't set my fps lower than 30? I don't even play the real game that high. It makes my keyboard all hot and I have to suspend the process whenever I alt-tab

 

No reason, I just set it at this value, but there is no reason why it couldn't be lower. I believe you can forcefully edit it in DeedPlanner configuration file for now (which is simple text file).

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Make it so my PC doesn't overheat after having the deed planner open for 20 minutes, please :)

 

(Seriously, this happens. It's clearly a problem with my hardware, but it also points at how unoptimised the DeedPlanner is)

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To the guy who said -1 to unity, I'd also like to know where that's coming from?

Unity has a bad rep but that's wrongly placed. Some amazing games have been made with.it but even more worse ones. Its nothing to do with the engine but the programmer(I think we can agree Warlander will not have this problem). The ease of access makes people churn out a lot of rubbish with unity but it's a great engine in the right hands.

Edited by Enuf

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When I designed my deed, Deedplanner was good enough (couldn't have done it without it, so thanks again!). :)

 

The biggest changes I'd have liked to have had:

 

- Global find and replace on walls/fences (so I could easily swap from, say, sandstone to slate versions to see what it looked like);

- Ability to put cave openings on the cave map (had to improvise by signifying those with veins or other blocks I wasn't using elsewhere).

- Line fills between two selected end points (for tile type and elevation).

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16 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

- Ability to put cave openings on the cave map (had to improvise by signifying those with veins or other blocks I wasn't using elsewhere).

 

Added in one of latest versions.

 

35 minutes ago, Xandaros said:

Make it so my PC doesn't overheat after having the deed planner open for 20 minutes, please :)

 

(Seriously, this happens. It's clearly a problem with my hardware, but it also points at how unoptimised the DeedPlanner is)

 

26 minutes ago, Enuf said:

To the guy who said -1 to unity, I'd also like to know where that's coming from?

Unity has a bad rep but that's wrongly placed. Some amazing games have been made with.it but even more worse ones. Its nothing to do with the engine but the programmer(I think we can agree Warlander will not have this problem). The ease of access makes people churn out a lot of rubbish with unity but it's a great engine in the right hands.

 

Yep, DeedPlanner in its current iteration is still using home-made rendering engine having its roots back when I was still in high school, and the program depends on it so much that it's impossible to optimize it properly without rewriting the entire program (last rework in camera system adding isometric view took waaay too long because of this). I introduced some changes to improve the performance over time and at least 2d view is relatively well optimized now, but 3d still suffers from issues. Change to Unity would immediately improve the performance based on just the frustum culling and better batching alone, and there are way more things that could be optimized after the switch.

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9 hours ago, Warlander said:

Why? :)

Personally I have much more experience with Unity than with UE4, so it's my first choice for projects like this. I'm sure performance will go up even with graphical improvements, currently DeedPlanner uses rather crude rendering techniques that work good enough for small maps, but are problematic when number of walls/objects on screen go up.

 

3 hours ago, Enuf said:

To the guy who said -1 to unity, I'd also like to know where that's coming from?

Unity has a bad rep but that's wrongly placed. Some amazing games have been made with.it but even more worse ones. Its nothing to do with the engine but the programmer(I think we can agree Warlander will not have this problem). The ease of access makes people churn out a lot of rubbish with unity but it's a great engine in the right hands.

 

I think there are already plenty of flamewar posts out there about unity and its single threaded game loop, the performance hit from context switching virtual cores, and other general performance issues. I don't think it would be constructive or entertaining for us to hash that out again here though. In the end, without taking time to collect a bunch of data anything I say will be anecdotal, probably biased, and unlikely to change any minds. Even any data I provided would add nothing new to the larger debate that takes place outside of this forum by many people sharing both viewpoints.

I *can* tell you that I own an awful lot of games and most times when I find one is running like trash it turns out to be related to mono. I've even tried running many of them on a copy of that filthy M$ OS with no improvement. In fact I can't think of a single Unity application that I am comfortable leaving running for extended periods of time when I'm AFK.

I get that its easy but in my (unlikely to change) opinion its just bad. I hold it in similar disregard to any of the quickbuild scaffolding frameworks where you get to churn out products easily and quickly but become essentially tied to the bad decisions and inevitable workarounds of that framework. I'd rather see a new home made rendering engine based on lessons learned from this one and the experience gained since high school. (I'd actually be pretty excited to see what you came up with from the nerd standpoint even if nothing else.)

 

</.02>

/me picks up his soapbox and goes home.

 

Regardless, many thanks for the fun tool.

Even if I decide to stubbornly refuse to use the new one over religious differences (highly likely knowing me) I hope to continue to enjoy the current version for many years. (I don't actually have any use or need for a tool to plan a deed for Wurm as I can do that just fine in my head, but I find it an amazing standalone experience blending Wurm with the instant building satisfaction of say SL or Sims)

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I'd like to add the ability to place furniture in more specific locations or adjust the grid on which they are placed. Not sure how feasible that is, but it would make planning out furniture and building layouts 100x more convenient.

Edited by Budzilla

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My comments:

 

Firstly, my primary use is to see what deeds/buildings would look like - the one thing I would really like to add is a floor-aware wurmian view - not necessarily up bridges between different levels, but if I could move the wurmian view up and down levels, that'd be great. For instance, I recently wanted to see the difference between walls and parapets on top of the third floor of one of my buildings. So went to a spot in the game, tried to align the 3d camera in WP to capture the same, switched to 2D and modified the building, then back to 3D. Perhaps there is a way to do this, but I couldn't find it.

 

This brings me nicely on to my second point, I only use WP occasionally, and every time I need to relearn some of the keys to use. It would be great if there'd be a dialog or overlay with controls, as it'd save me finding the forum post with the controls.

 

Thirdly, a feature I would really like would be to be able to copy and paste between different maps. For instance design a building in one file and insert it into a deed map dump. Again, this may be possible, but I can't find out how.

 

Then about the poll itself:

I can't see that much of a difference between the two options "Usable, but takes time to get used to" and "Good enough, but could use some improvements". So much so that I wasn't sure which was nearest the middle of the scale. It would probably help if the options were ordered from one extreme to the other.

 

Finally, although I only use Deed Planner occasionally, I really appreciate the tool - so thank you very much for providing it.

 

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