Tue Jul 12, 2005 11:32 pm by Argh
I'll second that request. Maybe Louva-Deus's crew over at EOA might be willing to take a look at that once they've gotten the SUR Exporter Beta3 out the door...
The only problems I see with this are:
1. There needs to be a built-in function to rename things within any of the UTFs, regardless of structure- the names are still in the same places within the file structure, I suspect, so that's probably not very hard. For example, the FL Model Cloner doesn't handle TXMs correctly, so my attempts to make new TXMs for ALE references have all come up short. I don't get the one document somebody made about the "reversed CRCs" used for name strings in UTFs, and my attempts to follow the directions didn't end in success.
2. It's probably not going to resolve the issues we have with CMP/3DBs that don't use the "standard" FL CMP structure- i.e., all of the things that are currently corrupted by the Import plugin for MS3D. Minor problem, that, but still, it'd be nice if somebody would take a look at that.
3. Textures should automatically be renamed with the proper file extension, depending on whether they're MIP0 or MIPS (i.e., TGA and DDS respectively).
Basically, yeah... I'd like to see an improved UTF Edit. The one we have is pretty darn kewl, really, and does let users do quite a bit. But it'd be nice if it were a bit easier to master- for example, it's not intuitive that one can export VMESHDATA and VMESHREF information from a CMP into another CMP with the same name/Material structure and it'll still work (this is something I sometimes do when I go back and fix a ship that's already finished and hardpointed, but has minor geometry quirks or texturing issues- you can't do this willy-nilly of course).
