I noted some of these suggestions and we will discuss them at the next meeting.
Meanwhile, I hope you find answers to some of the points useful.
1. The Editor's interactions with Atmospheres (in particular, the way light addition appears to be implemented) isn't correct vs. the game. Materials using pbr_shading (see: burned_wood Material) when set up in the same way for weapons bloom into giant blobs of pure white in-game.
The TOD atmospheres that are visible at the editor may not be the same as the game version. To check the exact same atmosphere, you need to go into the Curved Atmosphere Editor and load the atmosphere sets for each faction. Also, since the lighting values are very different at different TOD's (a couple of magnitudes higher/lower), you have to use the Exposure Compensation feature. We have an internal task for creating documentation on Exposure Compensation, but it is a low priority.
2. If a modder moves a folder to a new sub-directory or changes the name, the metadata the Editor uses gets badly messed up. Suggest that there's a feature to "clean metadata" that, if the Editor can no longer find <Texture, FBX, Etc.> in the AssetSources sub-directory where it used to be, recursively searches through all of the sub-directories in AssetSources trying to find a match. If found, the asset's metadata is corrected automatically. If it can't be found at all (for example, user has deleted a file) then it should mark the object with the exclamation-point as normal.
Moving and renaming asset folders should be done via the "Resource Browser" inside the modding toolkit. Once done that way, there should not be any issues.
6. The Editor has some sort of memory leak or other serious problem leading to a sudden crash. It's not a matter of whether it's unstable and going to crash, but when. I've run it for hours, and I've also had situations where it crashed pretty quickly. It's much, much more likely to crash if you exit Edit Mode to enter the game and come back again more than once, but it has often crashed merely because I left it running overnight and un-minimized it, lol.
We would appreciate dumps for these kinds of crashes, if you can provide them, would be very useful for us reproducing them.
8. Articles I found online claimed that bow animations involved painting the bow's vertexes blue, and the string in aqua (RGB 0, 255, 255). This isn't correct. It appears bows use vertex animations, but there are no examples or documentation of this feature and how if any it differs from Warband.
Is this from the official documentation? If so, we would appreciate it if you pointed us to the exact part where this is mentioned incorrectly.
9. The Editor appears to use a lot more GPU memory than the regular game does. I've seen corrupted textures and other things that indicate the GPU ran out of memory... and, uh, I have a 3080 TI with 12 GB of VRAM, lol. There might be something wrong there, lol.
It is normal for the editor to use more GPU memory since it also supports the editing of content. However, it should not be as high as 12 GB. Either very big textures are being loaded into the engine or there is a leak. If you can provide us with some more info regarding the total size of the module you are working on, that would be great.
10. The Editor has a method to make a new Shader... but it's totally black-box:
There isn't any documentation for this at all and it appears we're supposed to be providing relative filepaths to... er... something?
We have an internal task for creating documentation on creating shaders.
There needs to be simple, straightforward methods to create new MobileParty objects for modders to manipulate.
In MobileParty class ->
public static MobileParty CreateParty
This is used to create parties without components or custom components. This should probably be not used in most cases since this is an advanced usage.
The more basic approach would be to create parties through their components:
BanditPartyComponent[B].[/B]CreateBanditParty
CaravanPartyComponent.CreateCaravanParty
GarrisonPartyComponent.CreateGarrisonParty
LordPartyComponent.CreateLordParty
MilitiaPartyComponent.CreateMilitiaParty
VillagerPartyComponent.CreateVillagerParty
and
CustomPartyComponent.CreateQuestParty