Mass Constraint changer for serious builders

[andy1976uk]

I suggested this on FPS a few hours ago, but just incase it doesn't gain any traction there, I'll also mention it here....

I'd like to suggest a STool that could be very useful to serious builders. The idea is that you can change the values of all (or most) constraints within a single contraption with a single click only. This would obviously save a lot of time and effort.

Ideally you could specify an absolute value for the things you wanted to change, or a relative value stated in % terms. For example; you may have a large structure with dozens or hundreds of props and you realize you made a mess of the weld strengths, weights etc so you could say make all welds twice as strong and triple the weight of each prop. Could be very useful if it worked with Health values and maybe stuff like color settings too.

Anyway, I hope this isn't too complicated a suggestion and that I explained myself properly.

[Hitman271]

A way I think this could be done is like how the smart weld and no-collide multi do their individual constraints. Maybe a coder could like add in options to those existing stools in way.

[Pyro-Fire]

i think we need a way to increase the strength of constraints w/o weight. nothing more >_>

[andy1976uk]

Hmmm, I should have called it "Multi constraint changer", saying "mass" may give the impression it's just about changing weight values when I was actually proposing a tool that could change many different types of values all in one go.

This would be a useful productivity tool - just the other day it could have saved me a few hours of manually changing values for each prop (instead I never bothered and just threw the contraption away *sighs*).

[andy1976uk]

To elaborate a bit further; the point is that frequently you want to change the properties of multiple props (this is where the approach used in nocollide multi / smart welder / smart constraint comes in) and you don't want to click on each one prop individually. An example: I had a long tube thing the other day that I'd very carefully welded (manually, no auto-tools) and had the right approach to the weight proportions, however, I seriously failed with the numbers involved. I chose huge numbers when later on I discovered I needed much lighter things (to brutalize with SPD lol).
To fix this would have taken too long and many dozens of clicks - therefore the tool I'm requesting would allow you to alter the weight (or colour, health, or perhaps other numerical properties) of every one of those props with just the 1 (or handful) of clicks.

You could specify that each prop should weigh 50% of it's original amount, or 200%, or you could set an absolute value (if you really wanted a uniform number for each prop), you could do a number of interesting things. I think this would be very useful productivity tool for GMod.

[Eagle0600]

I agree, this would be good.

[andy1976uk]

Thanks Eagle

[moogle_man]

Hey andy, I whole heartedly agree with you on this one, sadly I can only code in FPI Logic, NWN Script and a modified form of basic called Future Pinball basic. So no help from me (and yes I was showing off there ). This is the thing we need to get the entire community working on, if everybody was helping it would probably work!