[Idea] Better Book Editor

Talk about the mods you'd like to see in Daggerfall Unity. Give mod creators some ideas!
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Eksevis
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jul 22, 2017 8:00 pm

[Idea] Better Book Editor

Post by Eksevis »

Okay, so, I understand how this might be relatively hard to create, but considering there are tools of it already laying around, in theory you could build off them and just update and implement better features in it.

I'll go ahead and admit I can barely code, so I couldn't make this myself, but anyway, lets get into it.

dfbedit requires that you have Visual Basic 5 installed. VB5 is still acquirable, but you have to do a little digging. The other book editor uses Windows DOS and has an extremely dated layout and functions. Though I suppose it wouldn't be used by too many people, but it still could be useful to have a new book editor.

For more practical reasons past just fixing all of the books would be adding a new book/letter for your custom quest. This new editor would either always have a line telling you the line the screen ends, or have a toggable one, which would then help you know how far letters can go. Maybe there would be a mode to display the text like it would in-game, with some customization in case someone eventually changes the font - maybe by detecting what font the game is using.

Maybe you could go one step further and even add it so you see the page background and just go off that, instead of the line complete with the in-game font. In fact, that's probably better and easier than putting a line.

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Deepfighter
Posts: 138
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Re: [Idea] Better Book Editor

Post by Deepfighter »

Hey there,
personally, I don’t really understand why you are looking into “old” editors, while you have the (real) chance of asking the people, who have fought the "book-battle" for a long time in the front line what they use. Namely the people who do or did translate Daggerfall (at least I would go that easy route).

The books are a mess – I completely agree. They are the best example of the rush and hasty release procedure of the game. Anyway, for the Russian translation VorteX DrAgON created some tools for editing the relevant files, including a book editor. Daneel53 from the French community translated and bug fixed the tools for the Project French Daggerfall (PFD). We, the German translators, used them from the beginning, too. After some feedback from our side and after porting the tools to be functional with 64-bit operation systems they are now (feature) finished and more prominently released. The book editor included has the line break and a lot of help messages to make it quite impossible to screw up the formatting. ;) The ingame-preview is because of that after all not needed and would mean much more work on the editor as reasonable (keyword: Debugging). For your imagination: Before this line break feature was added I had to check every book page manually ingame for exceeded line length which consumed a lot (months) of time. The new version should make things therefore easier for your project, too. :)

Official page: https://sites.google.com/site/lesiteded ... daggerfall
Link to tools on UESP: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:File ... nd_Viewers

For any other questions regarding books, formatting and so one don’t hesitate to ask me, as I am into that quite well. :)
Head of the German Daggerfall translation - www.daggerfalldeutsch.de
and German translator for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Lore-Expert for The Elder Scrolls: Online

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