Minetest Forums

Hi

That is an editor request from programmers for minetest.

As you know there are some machines which provides their own textboxes or buttons to craft some nodes.
For example abjhabet , mineshaft
So it could be nice if we could create this kind of formspecs with graphical intearface.

example picture

It should have an option for Unified_Inventory style formspecks too.

So, your idea is a "formspec editor" for Minetest ?

That's a great idea !

Actually, if you want to create great formspecs in Minetest, it's just a crazy thing...

While this as an idea certainly isn't bad, once you've made a few formspecs they get pretty easy to do, they just have a very steep learning curve.

+1

+1

Maybe we'd be better off changing the GUI system entirely for something more standard (and prettier?), but it would break all mods. Those choices all seem viable to me:

• Nuklear
• imgui
• NanoVG
• NanoGUI (requires C++11)
• libRocket (uses a subset of HTML and CSS, slightly CPU-heavy, has been implemented in games like Warsow and Unvanquished)
• Qt (while it's heavy, it's actually usable for games, see the Doomsday Engine for a live example)

Really, lightweight C or C++ UI toolkits are not lacking in 2016, as you can notice. :)

Somebody could work on a branch to try to integrate one of those to Minetest.

IMHO that is the way to go. Calinou would it be possible to have compatibility for old formspec for one or two releases so mods don't break immediately? Because some mod devs don't use the dev version and would need to make the changes immediately after release which can be quite hard with limited free time.

lightonflux wrote:IMHO that is the way to go. Calinou would it be possible to have compatibility for old formspec for one or two releases so mods don't break immediately? Because some mod devs don't use the dev version and would need to make the changes immediately after release which can be quite hard with limited free time.

Or perhaps change it in 0.5. Isn't 0.5 supposed to break compatibility with all current mods anyways?

wilkgr76 wrote: Or perhaps change it in 0.5. Isn't 0.5 supposed to break compatibility with all current mods anyways?

Afaik the planned incompatibility in 0.5 was limited to the network layer.

lightonflux wrote:

wilkgr76 wrote: Or perhaps change it in 0.5. Isn't 0.5 supposed to break compatibility with all current mods anyways?

Afaik the planned incompatibility in 0.5 was limited to the network layer.

Oh

I would prefer to just have a small app to quickly render/preview formspecs;
similar to the way many HTML editors are nowadays.
Just a text editor with a preview button.

Napiophelios wrote:I would prefer to just have a small app to quickly render/preview formspecs;
similar to the way many HTML editors are nowadays.
Just a text editor with a preview button.

+100

Just wrote this:
https://bitbucket.org/adrido/formspec_viewer/overview
Its a Subgame so you have to install it into games directory.
Screenshot:

If I would have more time, I would extend it to a full Editor/Designer, but sadly the day does only have 24 hours.
Pull Requests wellcome.

Known Bugs:
size[] does not work with a floatpoint. eg. size[7,8] works, size[5.5,6.5] will not work.

Bugs wontfix:
Crash when pressing ESC button. (If you press ESC you probably want to exit the game. This way it exits without the pause-Menu. so its not a bug, Its a feature :-)

addi wrote:Just wrote this:
https://bitbucket.org/adrido/formspec_viewer/overview
Its a Subgame so you have to install it into games directory.
Screenshot:

If I would have more time, I would extend it to a full Editor/Designer, but sadly the day does only have 24 hours.
Pull Requests wellcome.

Known Bugs:
size[] does not work with a floatpoint. eg. size[7,8] works, size[5.5,6.5] will not work.

Bugs wontfix:
Crash when pressing ESC button. (If you press ESC you probably want to exit the game. This way it exits without the pause-Menu.

That looks cool!

addi wrote:so its not a bug, Its a feature :-)

Thank you Microsoft ☺

Napiophelios wrote:I would prefer to just have a small app to quickly render/preview formspecs;
similar to the way many HTML editors are nowadays.
Just a text editor with a preview button.

This doesn't cover cases where you want to generate the elements of a formspec at runtime.

Byakuren wrote:This doesn't cover cases where you want to generate the elements of a formspec at runtime.

Still better than blindly editing files and reloading every 5 seconds just to get the layout "right" :)

kaeza wrote:

Byakuren wrote:This doesn't cover cases where you want to generate the elements of a formspec at runtime.

Still better than blindly editing files and reloading every 5 seconds just to get the layout "right" :)

The post I was responding to was in response to a post about replacing formspecs with a better system.

EDIT: Or maybe I mistook it for being that.

Bug Report:

changing the values in size does not change the size of the formspec

addi wrote: Known Bugs:
size[] does not work with a floatpoint. eg. size[7,8] works, size[5.5,6.5] will not work.

Anyway I Improved the parsing of the size[w,h] element, so It should work now even with float numbers
latest version: https://bitbucket.org/adrido/formspec_v ... master.zip

Works now! (although I had not used a floatpoint value when I tried it first)

The only improvement I can think of would be to add buttons at the bottom to load common formspec code(s) such as 'craft guide', furnace', etc

Yes, I may add this in future versions. Furnaces or chests might be a bit more difficult, because the "context" is missing.

I decided to create a simple web app which allows you to create formspecs using drag and drop : https://github.com/cdqwertz/minetestFormspecCreator

It is not finished yet.

I just added an online version : https://cdqwertz.github.io/minetestForm ... index.html

does not load...

oops. it loads actually :)