SLADE SWITCHES editor is agony

I don't know where to officially complain about this so I'm leaving it here in hopes it'll be noticed. I'm trying to use SLADE's built-in editor for the BOOM SWITCHES lump and I'm finding it to be completely unusable.

There's no workflow. I create a new switch and select it, then enter the details. The details don't "stick". What am I supposed to do? Click off it, and then click back onto it. Suddenly the details stick. Why does it work this way? This is incredibly slow and causes severe RSI for me.

There should either be one of two things here:

• A button in the area to the right that says "Apply to selected"
  
• Pressing ENTER while in the texture editing boxes should just apply the changes instantly.
  

In addition, the controls keep changing back to default state every time I add a new one. I need to add almost 80 switches, all commercial mode, and most of them named like SW1NEWxx / SW2NEWxx. Every time I add a new switch, it not only clears both edits to "????????" which has to be manually deleted rather than simply typed over, AND it changes the radio button back to Shareware.

I have a lot of experience in UI design from my job and I can tell you, this is bad.

I am giving up and looking for the swantbls util. It'd be faster and a LOT less painful to hand write the script and run a crusty old EXE in DosBox than to use this in its present state. I hope this feedback will help somebody in the future though.

Quasar said:

I don't know where to officially complain about this

Here.

Yeah, the interface is clunky, but with nobody complaining about it until today (it's been that way for years) there had been no real incentive to redo it.

Quasar said:

I am giving up and looking for the swantbls util.

Actually, you can still use SLADE this way. Write your SWANTBLS lump and it'll be recognized as being of the type "Boom Swan Tables". Then right-click -> Compile to SWITCHES and ANIMATED.

Quasar said:

run a crusty old EXE in DosBox

I'm using Boom Animation Manager, it's pretty adequate.

Yes, Espi's bam.exe is a very nice and intuitive tool, I've never had any problems using it.

Gez said:

Actually, you can still use SLADE this way. Write your SWANTBLS lump and it'll be recognized as being of the type "Boom Swan Tables". Then right-click -> Compile to SWITCHES and ANIMATED.

That's cool, I didn't know about it. Will give it a try if I need to modify my script again.

I AGREE WITH THIS TOPIC SO MUCH

 

Also lol when you copy text from bam.exe to Slade, but in bam.exe the animations are written backwards (last frame on the left, first frame on the right) so it fucks up everything.

 

Also in Slade editing SWITCHES doesn't do anything for me, but if I edit SWANTBLS and create SWITCHES from that then it works. Haven't found a way to get ANIMATED to work though.

Ok I don't understand anything.

 

Open Slade -> unedited BOOMEDIT.WAD

 

 

Really, NUKAGE3 is first???????

Wrong label, the first column should be "Last" and the second should be "First". Why? Because that's the format it's in, ask id Software.

 

I fixed that wrong label a while ago, you must be using an old version.

Is there a way to convert ANIMDEFS to SWITCHES or ANIMATED? Because that would save some time considering how easy it is to write ANIMDEFS.

15 hours ago, Gez said:

Wrong label, the first column should be "Last" and the second should be "First". Why? Because that's the format it's in, ask id Software.

 

I fixed that wrong label a while ago, you must be using an old version.

My SLADE version is 3.1.1.5. Checking for updates, it believes it's the latest version. My ANIMATED lump definitely has reversed labels.

The labels are correct in the 3.1.2 beta, though the "Last Texture" column is still displayed to the left of the "First Texture" column, which I'd prefer the other way around just for the sake of intuitive-ness. I don't think keeping the exact format in which the data are saved is necessary when displaying the data for people to view and edit them by hand. Or are there other benefits than, basically, intuitive-ness (which overlaps with familiarity with the format)? Because if it's just intuitive-ness, I'd argue it's better to display "First Texture" first.

Edited August 6, 2017 by scifista42