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glacier-modding / RPKG-Tool

The RPKG tool allows for easy (un)packing of files from the Glacier Engine RPKG file format! Hitman 3 has the most support.
https://glaciermodding.org/rpkg/
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[GUI] Make entity/brick editor read-only #75

Closed atampy25 closed 1 year ago

atampy25 commented 1 year ago

There exists already at least one person that because 9 months ago he started his mods using the RPKG brick editor (which has zero warnings that it's outdated or shouldn't be used) finds it now very difficult to update his mods to a modern standard.

Something needs to be done, and unless the solution is to just completely rebuild QNE but in C# (and with a huge developmental load given RPKG doesn't even have QN 3 yet), the brick editor needs to be altered to make it less likely that this happens again.

RPKG might be a swiss army knife (though it does most things poorly and never tried to be a swiss army knife in the first place), but "sharpening" this knife would mean reinventing the wheel, given there already exists a complete replacement for the entity editor with a far better user experience and far more features.

As an aside, who's going to sharpen the knife? The last set of significant changes made to the brick editor were in October of last year and are generally agreed upon to have made things worse; indeed, they have largely been reverted since. You can't leave something in a terrible state and then claim doing anything about it would be bad because the ideal would be to make it better.

It's completely ridiculous that a modding community can have tools integrated into the main program that actively hurt people trying to make mods.

There does exist one main reason to keep the brick editor as it is; many people use it for quickly inspecting the structure and content (to a limited degree) of entities. As such, this PR makes the entity/brick editor read-only, preserving this use-case but preventing people from making the mistake of using it to create new mods.

There is, as far as I know, no legitimate use-case for the brick editor that requires saving changes to binary files. QuickEntity supports all HITMAN trilogy games and its editor is far more competent than RPKG's. The only argument I can think of is that it's suitable for small mods with no intention of providing compatibility or a good user experience. I argue that QuickEntity Editor provides a much smoother way of creating these small mods and is much better for distribution.

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

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RDIL commented 1 year ago

Will be making all the required changes when I wake up tomorrow morning.