SUGGESTION: Room Information

[esper]

I'm sorry if this has been asked. It's my first time (at least as far as I remember) making a suggestion, so bear with me. I'm sure there's probably a very good reason why this hasn't been done yet, as it seems simple enough.

First: Why can't there be a place to rename rooms in the room's properties, rather than right-click>renaming them in the room editor?

Second: It would be nice if you could reorder the rooms in the room editor. I just spent a month making sixty rooms for my game. Now, I have to figure out which order they need to go in and then import them. It would be so much easier if I could just import them all in the order they are saved and then reorder them by dragging them around the editor view.

Like I said, these suggestions probably aren't worth the 3k of space on these forums they're taking up, but I think it would make things a little simpler for everyone.

[R4L]

I agree with you esper. I hate using the room descriptions! 

[esper]

Also, as I just was trying to make an animated room and found I actually had to run the game to find out how it would look... it would be nice if you had something like the view preview where you could see a realtime animation of your animating background which changed as you altered the FPS so you could see what it looked like at that speed right away. This would really help people who want to fine tune room animations.

[R4L]

esper, I think their is a preview room selection in the room tab.

[esper]

That's not quite the same... I mean I would like to see a room preview where you could change the FPS while previewing it so you could fine tune the animation. As it stands you have to pick the animation speed, preview, change animation speed, preview, etc... I mean it would be better the way the view animation preview works, although previewing the whole background might be a little more difficult to implement.

EDIT: I also just realized that the fullscreen preview distorts my preview. I'd like to see what my 640x480 background looks like at 640x480, not 1280x800.

[Gilbert]

Second: It would be nice if you could reorder the rooms in the room editor. I just spent a month making sixty rooms for my game. Now, I have to figure out which order they need to go in and then import them. It would be so much easier if I could just import them all in the order they are saved and then reorder them by dragging them around the editor view.

Aren't the rooms sorted by their room numbers? If you can reorder them freely it will certainly break script etc. references to room numbers. Unless what you want is just to reorder their order in the list, not their room number, I agree here that it may be a good idea, but obviously ordering by room number sounds like the EXPECTED default behaviour anyway.
Anyway, since the editor is undergoing complete overhaul in V2.8, there will not be any changes made to the current V2.72 version anymore. Since I can't test V2.8 here at work (couldn't install stupid .NET) I can't confirm how this part is handled in the new editor. If you think it's really worthwhile to add this (provided that it's not already in the V2.8 editor), feel free to add this suggestion in the V2.8 alpha thread.

Finally, my advice is:
Plan ahead.
Though improving the game editor may help tidying up one's work, it certainly can save a lot of frustration if one did better planning before actually start making a game (like assigning suitable numbers to your rooms to be made so that you can foretell the order of their placement in the list).

[esper]

Yeah, I meant reordering them in the list so, for example, all the rooms located in one building could be next to each other even if they weren't numbered that way. I can handle coding room numbers if the room numbers are out of order in the list, but it would make them easier to find if I could reorder the rooms themselves in the list, or put them in separate folders.

I didn't know 2.8 had it's own suggestion thread. I really don't want to post this a second time, as I was really loathe to do it this first time. I'd like to see if any AGSers more respected than myself agree and would like to see these changes as well before I do so.

[Pumaman]

First: Why can't there be a place to rename rooms in the room's properties, rather than right-click>renaming them in the room editor?

This is addressed by the 2.8 editor.

Second: It would be nice if you could reorder the rooms in the room editor. I just spent a month making sixty rooms for my game. Now, I have to figure out which order they need to go in and then import them. It would be so much easier if I could just import them all in the order they are saved and then reorder them by dragging them around the editor view.

Sounds like a reasonable idea, would anyone else find it useful?

[Ali]

I think that would be very useful, however I wonder if it would look odd if the room numbers ran out-of-sequence.

Might it be possible to identify a room by its name rather than its number? Then it would be possible to arrange and re-arrange rooms without confusion.

EDIT: In light of Babar's post, I'd like to add that I didn't realise I was asking for something that would mean changing the engine. I do think it would be useful though.

[Babar]

While I realise that it would be a change to the actual AGS engine rather than the editor, I like Ali's suggestion muchly. While esper's suggestion is purely cosmetic (not that I wouldn't find it useful, seeing how I spend hours ordering things so that they fit neatly into groups), I recall wanting that I could work directly with room names, but right now I can't remember why.... I got so peeved, I renamed a room from one number to another outside the editor, and (I thought) fixed all the references to it in the script, but still ran into a host of weird problems.

[esper]

Couldn't you emulate using names (ie. tell AGS that "Living Room" is equal to room 5) so you can address it by either the actual number OR use the room name as a "nickname?"

[GarageGothic]

The problem is that the room names - as far as I know - are stored within the room file itself, which isn't loaded until the player enters that room. A workaround, which may be what Esper is suggesting, is do define eNum values in the global script corresponding to the room numbers (eRoomLivingRoom = 5).