- Record exists in base only. It has not yet been modified in the edited plugin.
- Record exists in base and has been modified in the edited plugin. This is indicated by a "*" in the original CS in the ID column.
- Record did not exist in the base and has been added in the edited plugin. This is also indicated by a "*" in the original CS.
- Record did exist in the base but has been deleted in the edited plugin. This is indicated by "DELETED" in the original CS.
I think I will make icons for it rather soon so I want to put my visiual metaphors propositions.
Record exists in base only. It has not yet been modified in the edited plugin.
Square. Or maybe nothing
- Record exists in base and has been modified in the edited plugin. This is indicated by a "*" in the original CS in the ID column.
Crossed =. Or perhaps a ring.
- Record did not exist in the base and has been added in the edited plugin. This is also indicated by a "*" in the original CS.
Plus.
- Record did exist in the base but has been deleted in the edited plugin. This is indicated by "DELETED" in the original CS.
Not sure if it would help any, but deleting records is seen as a very bad thing to do when modding. When you delete a record it's no longer physically present for the running game, so any actions on those records become undefined (vanilla tends to crash, but even if we can catch it there's little we can do that makes sense; it's like trying to gracefully handle accessing a valid pointer that isn't). The issue is so bad that the various TES*Edit tools will warn about deleted records and provides an automated 'undelete and disable' function, which removes the deleted flag and marks the record as disabled so it won't appear in game.
In that vein, IMO, any record that "did exist in the base but has been deleted in the edited plugin" should be eye-grabbingly visible with a clear warning attached.
+ vs x does not look good to me. I already done first version of status icons (well, it was easy and fast) with + and -. I think that we should stick with this for now and change if some will find it bad.
Chris wrote:Not sure if it would help any, but deleting records is seen as a very bad thing to do when modding. When you delete a record it's no longer physically present for the running game, so any actions on those records become undefined (vanilla tends to crash, but even if we can catch it there's little we can do that makes sense; it's like trying to gracefully handle accessing a valid pointer that isn't). The issue is so bad that the various TES*Edit tools will warn about deleted records and provides an automated 'undelete and disable' function, which removes the deleted flag and marks the record as disabled so it won't appear in game.
In that vein, IMO, any record that "did exist in the base but has been deleted in the edited plugin" should be eye-grabbingly visible with a clear warning attached.
Obviously a modder who deletes a record is responsible for removing any references to it. At least for the loaded content files OpenCS will provide an error message from the verifier in this case. For plugins beyond these files, there is obviously nothing the CS can do. But again, that is just one of an infinite number of cases where a modification to a plugin can cause other stuff to break. It is simply impossible to do anything about most of these cases and IMHO even considering dealing with it on the editor level is an utter waste of time.
sirherrbatka wrote:+ vs x does not look good to me. I already done first version of status icons (well, it was easy and fast) with + and -. I think that we should stick with this for now and change if some will find it bad.
We can try it. At this stage there is a lot of room for experimentation.
