Small suggestions for OpenMW-CS

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openmwfan27
Posts: 113
Joined: 23 Apr 2015, 22:11

Small suggestions for OpenMW-CS

Post by openmwfan27 »

I have a few ideas for the OpenMW-CS after spending some time with it.

I'm very new to modding in general let alone modding morrowind but i managed to create my first morrowind mod the other day using the OpenMW-CS which was awesome. The mod was only simple (some emeralds on the floor in seyda neen for extra starting loot) but it was great to actually use OpenMW-CS for something, i've still got a lot to figure out about how things work in morrowind and the starters guide on the wiki is great.

I thought to myself today that it would be great if you could arrange those panels in any way you like rather then everything being vertical and i was pleased to see it already does this.

It would be good if you could drop two panels on top of each other to create a 'tab group' with a tab for each panel in that group, then not only could you put the panels where you want, but you could group them up how you want, so the biggest section of your screen contains the tabs for panels you use the most, and then maybe have occasionally used panels taking up much less screen space in the bottom right or something.

This would also be handy if you were editing lots of scripts so you could have a tab group on the right containing all the scripts you are working on, and the scripts table on the left for easily looking up scripts, at the moment if i wanted to work on 4 scripts i need to have 4 seperate panels open at once which dramatically reduces the screen space i have for the script i'm currently working on, having to resize the ui every time you want to 'switch' to another script isn't ideal. The current implementation becomes impractical once you get to the point where you need to work on 10 or more scripts and need to switch between them frequently, you can always use more monitors i guess but i wish i had more then one monitor :(

Another cool feature would be if OpenMW-CS remembers the position and layout of your panels between sessions, so you don't have to set up your UI every time you open OpenMW-CS. Optionally you could introduce a feature for 'saving' layouts as presets that you can activate from the main menu somewhere, this way you could have optimised UI layouts depending on the type of mod you're making (e.g something with lots of visual elements that need to be placed in the world vs a mod which is mostly just scripting )

Also, on the 'Global Search' panel, it would be good if there was a drop down of some kind that let you refine your results to a specific type (or types) of records, e.g only show results which are cells or scripts, and hiding other types of records that match the search keyword.

I still have not figured out how to use the filters properly, so it takes me *forever* to find anything in the tables but i'll figure it out, however it would be cool if there was a button to click, or perhaps by right clicking on the 'Record Filter' label in a panel, that would bring up a context menu showing all of the 'saved filters', and clicking on one of them will fill out the text box with the right text to perform that filter lookup.

I could just be mis-understanding something so that last suggestion might be completely missing the point.

Anyways, thanks again for the great work, OpenMW & OpenMW-CS are looking awesome and i can wait for the 0.40 release already :D
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