Organise stuff in folders/groups

Hi, I'm new to visionaire studio and really enjoying this tool to work on my project.

Was just wondering if there was any reason for the impossibility to organise anything inside a project. When a project is getting quite big, could have been very practical to, for example, group all the characters of a same scene together, same for texts and items. Because when you start to hove dozens or even hundreds of them it's not super easy to look after a specific thing.

I'm not using visionaire since a long time so maybe I just missed how to do that. If not, I was wondering if it was planned to add this feature wich seems quite basic. My project is not that big yet but will be. Was just thinking it must have been painful for Daedalic guys for example with projects as complex as Deponia.

Anyway, thanks for your great work.

Daedalic tend to create placeholders to organize things better. Simply create an object, scene, character, interface etc & leave it empty, change name to something like: -- chapter 2 --, -- npc's --, etc...

It's also a good idea to use prefixes when it comes to naming your objects - by objects I'm referring to everything you create in Visionaire Studio. This can be a character, an interface, a scene, a menu, a font, & so on.

For example, here is what you might name your scene objects:

• obj_button (obj refers to interactive scene object)
  
• itm_hammer (itm refers to something that can be picked up)
  
• img_photo (img refers to something that is non-interactive, that contains an image sprite)
  
• anim_cloud (anim refers to a non-interactive scene animation)
  
• area_button (area refers to an interactive area, that doesn't contain an image/animation sprite)
  
• exit_door-to-corridor (exit refers to an exit point to another scene)
  
• etc...
  

This is just a small insight into organizing your .ved data. I do agree with the groups thing. It would be a really nice feature but the problem is that it would only be valid for certain things. It would not be valid for scene objects or interface objects because they work on z-index & layer order which means that the objects added to those tables need to be ordered in a specific way for the engine to draw them on screen correctly.

Ok, thanks for this quick answer

I'm a quite obsessed developer and I love to have clean and well organised projects so I would have used naming conventions anyway

I just don't get your point about z-index or layers. I wasn't thinking of mixing different type of objects. Only having groups inside the Items seciton or Texts section... Just as a more ergonomic way to present things in the visionaire editor.

I was referring to objects that will be drawn onto the screen. These are layer dependent. Think in terms of a program like photoshop; the order in which you layer your images defines what is in front of, or behind each layer.

In Visionaire Studio, the scenes & interfaces for example draw data to the scene, so the order in which your objects are listed is important because these define the layer order in which the objects are drawn to the scene.

Maybe a grouping feature might be added to the new GUI Simon is working on, but I doubt anything like that would be implemented to the current IDE as wxWidgets which the current IDE is using, is very buggy & very limited in what it is allowed.

What would be nice is a placeholder / collapsible grouping system that allows you to group scenes, characters & interfaces etc (as these aren't layer dependent).

Yes I understand the concept of layers, but aren't these managed inside each scene or each interface? The global items list for example has nothing to do with that, right ? I'm not talking about doing grouping inside a scene.

I think when you say "What would be nice is a placeholder / collapsible grouping system that allows you to group scenes, characters & interfaces etc", it is exactly what I have in mind.


Visionaire is still good without this, just could be more comfortable for an everyday use.

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Yes I understand the concept of layers, but aren't these managed inside each scene or each interface? The global items list for example has nothing to do with that, right ? I'm not talking about doing grouping inside a scene.

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Exactly. What I said no? (guess it was probably just a mistranslation lost in translation)

I can still say I'm French as an excuse for not understanding everything

Thanks for your answers. It's good to see it's possible to find helpful people there without waiting forever. It's making this tool even better.