Dialog (menus) generator tool

[Razorwings18]

Is there such a thing as a visual "Dialog generator for description.ext" tool? I couldn't find one.

[WizzyWig]

i dont know of any but there is a great tut by Vektorboson just do a google search

[macguba]

Or just look in the Editors Depot.

[Razorwings18]

Thanks to both of you for your replies. Actually, I've been working on a tool that does exactly that (WYSIWYGish dialog generator), but I wanted to make sure nothing better existed, since there's not much point in uploading something that someone else has already done better.
Sorry I missled you. Here's a screenshot showing what it can do in less than 30 seconds  ;D .

[Chris Death]

looks promissing - lookin forward for that

~S~ CD

[vektorboson]

Very nice  

[General Barron]

Ohhhhhhhhhh............ SO many people are going to love you when you release that thing!

There are a lot of people out there who don't know how to make dialogs, and haven't learned because they seem too complicated, but would love to make them. I recently started figuring out dialogs, but I would much rather make them using a tool like that. It would save SO much time!

I remember a tool came out on the official forums that was supposed to do very limited dialog creation, like just showing you the size of rectangles or something, but not making complete dialogs. I never figure out how to use it. The guy never fully completed it, but there was so much interest in the thing. When you finish this, be sure to post it on the official forums; it will be of great service to the community

[Razorwings18]

Yep. I've just uploaded it, so check the pending submissions in the Editor's Depot if you're aching for it   .
Thanks for the advise on letting people on the official forums know; I'll do so once I've sorted out whatever bugs may get reported. Right now it's an open beta, which means just a couple of my friends and I tested it.

There are a lot of people out there who don't know how to make dialogs, and haven't learned because they seem too complicated, but would love to make them.

Indeed; I was one of them. That was until I started the scriptset I'm working on right now, which requires some HEAVY dialog-making. I figured it'd take me about the same time to develop this tool and have it make the dialog for me, than to fiddle with control and dialog classes manually. So here I am, releasing a tool that does something I never have!  ;D

EDIT: EEEKKKKK... I almost forgot. Vektorboson, thanks for your excellent tute. About 40% of OFPDM is there thanks to you. Thought I'd tell you "personally" rather than just in the "Acknowledgements".

Cheers.

[General Barron]

Alright! This tool is awesome!!!
Haven't used it much yet, but it looks great. Here are a few little nit-picky comments though (should be easy fixes):

It would be nice to have the "ok" button as the default so I can just press 'enter' after editing those controls.

The static/active text controls are kinda annoying how they act in some ways like a textbox. Either their text property should be editable by editing the text in the box (without double-clicking on the control), or you shouldn't be able to highlight text and there shouldn't be the blinking cursor.

Since the text doesn't resize itself in the textbox, which seems like it would be hard to do, it would still be nice to have some kind of visual representation of how tall the text will be. An easy solution may be to just have a colored rectangle representing the height of the text, and possibly even the width. Something like that would be very useful.

Just some little suggestions for an already great tool  ;D

[PsyWarrior]

Greetings,

All Hail Razorwings!

I have been learning how to create dialogs, but I find it to be a tedious and frustrating process...

-Type for hours to get the code down
-load Mission
-preview
-dialog is crap.
-Edit position of all controls, without really knowing where they'll end up.
-load mission
-preview
-dialog is worse
-edit size, font, position and colour of all controls
-load mission
-OFP crashes with "found 'c' expected';'"
-Tear hair out...

Razorwings18, you may have just saved my life (or at least my hair). I heard about a dialog editor that was in progress over at Flashpoint1985.com, but it seemed to disappear.

I can now finish several of my missions-in-progress in a tenth of the time it would have taken otherwise.

Thankyou! :thumbsup:  ;D

-Supreme Commander PsyWarrior
-Psychic Productions Studios.

[Planck]

OK Razorwings

I have also downloaded your tool, I haven't tried it yet as I had a few problems with installation, story as follows.

I am using Windows Me.

Installation reported that it couldn't proceed because some system files needed updating........Press OK to allow Setup to update the files......Press Cancel to quit Setup.

I pressed Cancel.

I might add that my Windows Me is fully up to dat as far as Windows Updates go.

I unzipped the CAB file and had a look to see which system files it meant, some of the DLL's and ActiveX controls were older than the ones on my system.

OK........So I took a backup copy of the relevant files on my system then told Setup to go ahead and update my system files.

Rebooted......Tried installation again..........same thing happened.

Then I remembered.....Windows Me will let you quite happily delete or replace system files.......it doesn't complain at all.
It just politely replaces the originals immediately afterwards.

In the end I just extracted OFPDialogueMaker.exe and the readme.txt into their own folder and ran it from there.

The tool opened, but I haven't played with it yet.

I will let you know how it goes.


Planck

[Razorwings18]

Thank you for your comments. I'm glad you found the tool useful, and even got to save parts of your anatomy just by using it!  ;D

It would be nice to have the "ok" button as the default so I can just press 'enter' after editing those controls.

The static/active text controls are kinda annoying how they act in some ways like a textbox. Either their text property should be editable by editing the text in the box (without double-clicking on the control), or you shouldn't be able to highlight text and there shouldn't be the blinking cursor.

Since the text doesn't resize itself in the textbox, which seems like it would be hard to do, it would still be nice to have some kind of visual representation of how tall the text will be. An easy solution may be to just have a colored rectangle representing the height of the text, and possibly even the width. Something like that would be very useful.

The ENTER for OK (and ESC to cancel) part was already in the plans and completely doable.

Text and Active text don't look like textboxes; they are textboxes. I had to use them instead of label controls since the latter lack some events I needed. I'll see if I can find a way to help having the text selected when you drag the mouse over it. Avoiding the textbox's standard common dialog is also in the plans (that is particulary annoying to me).

As for the font sizes, I'll see what I can do. I know the font's height -since it's a control property-, but in order to know the width I'd have to study how each font's size works and hardcode a height-to-width ratio for all of them.

I can now finish several of my missions-in-progress in a tenth of the time it would have taken otherwise

I hope this tool will let us see an increase in missions that ship with dialogs. Dialogs are quite versatile, and can be used for way more than just menus if you use your imagination.

OK Razorwings

I have also downloaded your tool, I haven't tried it yet as I had a few problems with installation, story as follows.

I am using Windows Me.

Installation reported that it couldn't proceed because some system files needed updating........Press OK to allow Setup to update the files......Press Cancel to quit Setup.

I pressed Cancel.

I might add that my Windows Me is fully up to dat as far as Windows Updates go.

I unzipped the CAB file and had a look to see which system files it meant, some of the DLL's and ActiveX controls were older than the ones on my system.

OK........So I took a backup copy of the relevant files on my system then told Setup to go ahead and update my system files.

Rebooted......Tried installation again..........same thing happened.

Then I remembered.....Windows Me will let you quite happily delete or replace system files.......it doesn't complain at all.
It just politely replaces the originals immediately afterwards.

In the end I just extracted OFPDialogueMaker.exe and the readme.txt into their own folder and ran it from there.

The tool opened, but I haven't played with it yet.

I will let you know how it goes.

One of my concerns when releasing this beta was particularly how OFPDM would behave under different OSes. I think the sensible thing to do would be to put a DLL-free non-installing version up for download, since modern MS OSes already come with VB6 DLLs. Whatsmore, the download would be in the 300KB in that case. Thanks for the heads-up; let me know how it works.

[PsyWarrior]

Greetings,

For the record, I had exactly the same problem as Planck, under Win2k with a 1.5Ghz AMD Athalon and a GeForce 4 Ti4800 SE. The installer always reports that system files need to be updated.

After updating the files and restarting, I get the same message.

Strangely, after extracting the CAB, I can run the application without any problems, without resolving the system files problem, possibly without installing at all.

After this, I was fairly impressed. It's not exactly MS Visual Studio (but then I never expected it to be), but it does make dialog editing several thousand times easier. The best thing is that it allows you to position your dialogs and controls visually, eliminating the trial and error, and error, and error...
[ some time later ]... and error nature of convential dialog editing. :thumbsup:

One question: do all the pictures and listboxes/ comboboxes have to be configured in .sqs?

-Supr. Cmdr. PsyWarrior
-Psychic Productions

[Razorwings18]

OK, I've put a non-installing DLL-free version for download along with the other one, so that should more or less solve the problem.

One question: do all the pictures and listboxes/ comboboxes have to be configured in .sqs?

Depends on what you mean by "configure". For pictures, certainly not; just type the name of your image in the "Text" property of the picture control and you're done. Just make sure your picture file's height and width are a number corresponding to a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...).
For listboxes and comboboxes, if you mean if they must be filled from your SQS, that's mostly correct. Of course you could fill them from anywhere else, including through button or active text's actions, but the bottom line is that the only way to fill them is through scripting commands. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's not exactly MS Visual Studio

Tell you what: give me the kind of budget the MS VS team was granted, and I'll give you effin Dreamweaver  ;D

[PsyWarrior]

Depends on what you mean by "configure". For pictures, certainly not; just type the name of your image in the "Text" property of the picture control and you're done. Just make sure your picture file's height and width are a number corresponding to a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...).
For listboxes and comboboxes, if you mean if they must be filled from your SQS, that's mostly correct.

Understood. I agree that that's the best way. I'm fluent in .sqs, so it isn't a problem for me - just checking that I wasn't missing anything...

Who needs MS Visual Studio anyway? This ingenious little app has allowed me to accomplish more in a day of editing than I could have done in a week!

One thing that would be really nice (although probably very hard to implement) would be a grid to 'snap' objects to, to assist with lining up controls. However, I could live without this. The only modification I'd really like to see at some point is the inclusion of more fonts - It's really not that difficult for me to change the fonts once OFPDM has generated the code, but it would still be nice to eliminate this extra step as well.

-Supr. Cmdr. PsyWarrior
-Psychic Productions