Unofficialcrusaderpatch: Request: AIV-Editor enhancements

[ByBurton]

There are a lot of things I wish were included into the AI Village editor.
And as Nere / Sh0wdown has already made changes to it I thought about some things that would definitely be neat.

1. Add missing regular units (Monks, Tunnelers, Engineers, Laddermen)
2. Add missing siege engines (Catapults, Shields, Siege Towers, Battering Rams)
3. Fix some of the good stuff not being build ingame / remove it from the editor
4. As requested in issue #318 melee units should all move between their spots, or at least go to them just like ranged units. (Not really an aiv editor issue but comes to mind here)
5. Prevent the deletion of the stockpile next to the keep as it can lead to weird things.
6. Fix the accidental "esc" press --> all data lost by adding a confirmation box
7. Make individual stairs placeable
8. Fix that if you place multiple unit rallypoints on top of eachother and you remove them all are removed and if you try to only place one of them again all of them are placed / you can't place the others again.

[Starshine575]

Espacally 7. is a very good point: stairs have the bug that you have to place it 6 tiles and otherwise you have to "cheat" a bit and place them 1 by 1.
Also it takes quiet long, if you forgot to place a stair on a low wall and try to implent it afterwards (I speak out of experiance 😂)

[Krarilotus]

1. Is not right. Right now you can remove only the one on top, the others are still at the exact location where they were. They will not be placed again somewhere else.

[Truetobi91]

1. Bugfix: There's also a bug in the data chart when trying to save or load a file where your actual mouse and the mouse icon don't fit at all.
2. Bugfix: Theres another very rare bug (it happened to me only once) where a rally point, that was placed on top of another, was removed but could not be used again so you'd have to completely rebuild the entire castle.
3. Make files (names) editable/deletable from within the editor

QoL imrpovements:

• Add zooming options 1.5 and 2.5

[ByBurton]

@Krarilotus ?!

[ByBurton]

@Truetobi91 I think the 10th one of yours is my 8th. Or that's kinda the one I mean.

[Krarilotus]

@Krarilotus ?!
all of them are placed / you can't place the others again.

only the top one, will be placeable again. You can place that exact one somewhere else. The others that you placed underneath at the same spot will remain at that exact location and will not be removeable nor placeable somewhere else. Its a bug but it doesnt work like you described it ^^

[Monsterfisch]

the patrolspots can be removed and placed again i have done it many times when making my castles it had something to do with placing all other spots and than clicking the exact spot again so it gets refreshed. at least something like that worked for me in the past

[Starshine575]

Hmmmm, at least we all agree that this should work diffrent than it currently does. 🤔

[Truetobi91]

And if I might add a very specific change that bothers me and my symmetry addiction: Change the resolution so that the tiles are squares instead of rectangles ^^

[Truetobi91]

I've got another two things to be added to the wishlist

Stockpile: Only the first additional stockpile can be placed next to the original one. If you want to place stockpiles north an south of that, you need to place one at the side and delete it afterwards which can become annoying when you're editing almost finished castles.

Checkpoints - Unlike the pause function that simply adds X empty building steps I'd like to have "checkpoints". If you want a certain part of the castle to really be finished before starting to work on the next one, use these. What it does: Before starting building steps after the checkpoint, it will check if all build steps before are being done. If not, it will start at the beginning and check for skiped building stepts.

[Monsterfisch]

like, for example, shifting the entire castle in certain directions for optimization
and building different heights of stairs like walls (not necessarily in one build step but at least so you don't have to place and delete the ones you don't want it gets a bit ridicules when you use a lot of stairs xP )
not sure if possible but being able to determine the ai to use the random version of the flowerbeds/statues if it is possible to differentiate between them ofc
I could also imagine a building counter so you don't have to count them manually which would help a lot when revisiting previous builds
krarilotus found a Chinese guy who was able to get ai to place a stair6 in the aiv somehow if that could be added by default as well that would be pretty nice
having a minimal estimated population counter for the buildings placed already would be good too so you know how many houses to build "roughly"
one important thing to try to recreate from the firefly version would be to try to recreate the mold feature with the pitch somehow as that can help a lot saving build steps but making it so that crenelated walls and walls don't overwrite each other so you can use walls to create mold as well (this would help a lot when making thick walls)
and maybe a way to move structures up and down in terms of the build step so you won't have to delete and place it again at the right build step

[Heroesflorian]

• Also, there is currently a bug related to adding "pauses" to the build order... if you place too many, it just bugs out, and you cannot remove some/any pauses anymore, and when trying to do so they move around in the build order in weird ways. I don't think there's currently any other way to fix this than exiting without saving and loading a state from before it happened... really annoying!
• It is possible to change textures used to display different buildings, walls, etc. in the AIV editor, but killing pits and high crenellations, for example, use the same texture. Being able to visually distinguish those, as well as a few of the other buildings, by having more different textures / visualization improvements would be quite helpful.
• When deleting the keep, the borders also disappear. When placing the keep in a new location, the borders stay gone. Without borders, drawing walls glitches out unless you manually create a new border out of moat/pitch/buildings first. What I would like is 1. walls not glitching out without border, 2. some general consistency regarding the presence/absence of that border. Being able to use the outermost row of tiles is nice, but currently it just feels a bit messy.
• Currently, even when fully zoomed out, one cannot see the full AIV area at once (only almost the full area). That definitely bugs me, especially with modern screens being more than large enough to handle this... also, a windowed mode without having to use wrapper programs would be nice^^
• Being able to (select and) cut/copy-paste parts of an AIV would probably be quite helpful if you want to adjust a castle or reuse certain "modular parts" throughout several AIVs. Imagine in an image editing program you select a certain area (i.e. a certain set of image pixels), and can then cut/copy/paste/drag it. For pasting, the pasted set of structures would be inserted at the currently selected build step.

[ByBurton]

What I would like to add:

• Unit gatherpoints for every unit. Not only those in the firefly editor. E.g. monks, tunnelers, engineers were missing
• being able to use walls in more than a 1x1 area at once
• using parts of stairs without having to build the full stairs and then deleting the not required parts
• a feature that checks basic requirements (is a stockpile in the aiv? is there a granary? are there enough houses for the aiv buildings that require workers? if there is a barracks, is there also a armoury?)
• gatehouses should be easier to recognize (NS / EW always confused me)