Axe&Hammer Edit - A VT mission editor Thread - Vector Thrust

Hey there, everyone. I apologize for keeping this away for so long, as I kept reporting it over and over, and all...

Ever since VT's first alpha releases, I've been working on a side project, in the form of a third-party mission editor/exporter for Vector Thrust. I coined it Axe & Hammer Edit, as a nod to Ace Combat Zero.
I've been working on this for the past two years, often take hiatuses and breaks, more often than needed, even.
I recently resumed development of the tool, and, after several recommendations from lots of people around, I've agreed to the fact I should at least talk about it instead of keeping it in the works until "when it's done".

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At present time, Axe Hammer Edit is a standalone executable made using AGS ( Adventure Game Studio ). It's an exporter, meaning you can't import existing missions, but can build them and then export them later into a format that can be directly read by Vector Thrust.

I am in the middle or refurbishing the GUI/Interface as a whole, and am currently working on a top-down map system. It might be chaotic-looking right now, and I apologize for it. The previous interface was a lot less conveninent, trust me on that. ( For those who wonder, this big orange space plus a "new button" is just a practical test for the map system, the tiny button being a bogus bogey to test a coordinate detection system using the mouse, for a contextual menu. )

While lots of buttons are missing and unprogrammed right now, AHE is compatible with all the known Action and Trigger types. It is possible to build potentially working missions, but there are some limitations:
-Actors currently cannot be defined, even though they have their own database. (Actors are NPCs that spawn directly upon mission start, regardless of faction or type ).
-All of the unit placements have to be done through manual number input, with X / Y / Altitude coordinates. This is the biggest gripe which led me to a complete redesign of the interface so far.
-While it's possible to load a custom map image and even output a preview of the mission's content, format limitations are restricted to an ungodly annoying BMP format.

Apart from that, AHE has already proven its efficiency on several fields. I designed it to be able to load up both vanilla content references/registers for units, aircraft, maps and musics, but also integrate user-made lists so that other musics can be selected instead of the default ones, for example.

Thus, a *highly* experimental reimporter script is in the works, but it's currently on standby as the new interface took top priority. It's been proven to work, but needs to be taught how to decipher every action, trigger, actor, kinds of types, in fact. Only a few actions and actor reimport scripts are useable, as tests.

I apologize for the lack of screenshots, as the UI redesign locked out several aspects of the program, which are actually still fully functional. I'll edit/post more once I can @.@
Includes, but is not limited to,
-A dialogue editor,
-Compatibility with the obscure sub-missions system ( read: Operations from AC6 )
-Custom lists for maps, aircraft, musics...
-Full edition over actions and triggers to potentially recreate any kind of mission for as long as it's basic enough,
-A template/Preset system that can be dynamic enough to accept custom values. An included example allows to re-create a B7R Contact like the 3rd mission of AC Zero, including control over the boss's aircraft model and the patrols', the number of patrols, etc...
-ability to define the combat airspace's borders, player start position/angle...
-spawning units, creating conditions and bridging the two together to cause scripted events.

Most of all, I'm wondering what those of you here think about such a tool. I'm at a point where I'd need feedback, and I can't afford working alone in my corner to eventually arrive late to the party. As I said, AHE is not finished, but I should no longer wait until it's completed to start bragging about it.

Questions/Thoughts?

Edited by: Wheaton_Adams

Looking snazzy so far/ Glad to see you've taken the initiative. Currently, I believe that AHE is actually more functionally complete than TS's mission editor at the moment. Will there be support for more unusual triggers like player/NPC altitude?

NPC altitude is technically already viable as you just have to make a trigger that checks if enemies are present in a particular area, which is, the size of combat airspace, but only of a certain height. For player though, the only trigger in existence is radial proximity. AHE can't do what VT cant' do.

Any news on this so far?

Considering nobody apparently seemed to care, in combination with the fact that TS released his own editor soon after, i'll be honest, I dropped most work on it. There's likely not going to be anything about this in a long while, if ever.