Greetings fellow fans

[ByteSquire]

Hello everyone, I'm ByteSquire or Zaphodgame,
I'm excited to finally be active on the Titan Quest fans forum.

I've played Titan Quest since the release of IT and always come back to it every once in a while, especially when new mods or official content releases.

Some of you may already know me from a variety of Discord channels or have visited the mastery calculator I've developed a couple of years ago.
I am currently working on even more tools for Titan Quest:

• A parsing library written in C# for parsing .tpl and .dbr files into usable data structures
• A wrapper library written in C# for using the official ArchiveTool distributed with the game and reading(WIP)/writing of .arz archives for the game's database
• A mastery mod for the game (very WIP)
• A replacement? for the ArtManager distributed with the game

I'm most excited about the Editor, with the recent release of the Godot 4 beta I have been looking forward to a nice GUI application project and with the support of multiple windows the time of waiting is over.



I know this will be a bit of a controversial move as I'm not creating anything new or particularly useful(for now) and there are plenty of tutorials for creating mods for Titan Quest and using the ArtManager and the other tools.
But I personally was always a bit disappointed by the ArtManager with it's old design, no way of validating data (that I know of), awful directory tree view and mediocre editors for values.
I also think it is very hard to get into as a beginner, part of that is due to the design of the database but I think there is a lot of room for improvement.

I love the idea of having a couple of modern toolkits that are open source and, therefore, easier to maintain for longer or by different people.

I am always searching for someone who would like to contribute anything, be it code, editor plugins/extensions, documentation, wiki, ideas, etc.
Or just using and giving feedback on anything is also appreciated, one person can only test so much and have one opinion.

[efko]

Hello @ByteSquire and welcome to the forum. It is a great pleasure to see known guy with great skills around.
I guess we all have ideas, so this should be right place for you to continue your work.

[Cleglaw]

Hi! A big welcome for you!

[soa]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

I'm mostly interested in the first and last points of your list.

1st : I'm not sure of the goal here, but could it allow to form a database like TQDB.net but for any mod ? Or an internal database to classify information, balance stuff, etc. ?

Last : Yes, replacing the Art Manager is a great idea. AM is just a pile of weak crap, I've used it for years and I see very well its limitations.

- no data validation (like verifying if a link to a dbr or a resource is valid, checking if the data type corresponds strings/integers/reals..., checking if numbers are not too high, 1.000000 can quickly turn into a million if you forget the dot)
- no way of editing values as smoothly as with any spreadsheet. Like a copy handle, drag&drop,...
- the database in the AM is not a true database, it's just an old tree view without any filter, find function (there's one but it's broken), very few information about each file if you don't open it
- no way to look for cross-references (you need an external tool)
- etc.

Also the main game database & templates are a real mess :
- added Xpack, Xpack2, Xpack3, Xpack4 directories instead of putting everything at the same place. A simple parameter in each file could tell us from which Xpack the file comes from.
- templates are not organized efficiently. For instance sounds are not regrouped in the same section, they are split between 3 or 4 different sections.
- lots of missing descriptions for parameters, sometimes wrong ones.
- many useless parameter values, or parameters without values, are left in dbrs. I wonder if over thousands of files it can affect performance.
- string parameters are not written in a unified manner, there's a mix of lower & upper case.
- etc.

I'm already modding the game, so it would be hard for me to provide more support than feedback and ideas. But it'd still be something.
If you manage to get a usable version, even if it doesn't compile properly the archives but still allows some efficient dbr edits, I would be happy to test it.
Currently the tool seems more or less functional, but I'm not sure how to launch it or what software is required to launch it. Is it Godot 4 beta ? Standard or .NET 6 build ? standard seems to fail and I don't have .NET 6 currently as above version 4 it tends to break many other TQ tools.

[ByteSquire]

Thanks for welcoming me everyone, much appreciated.

Good to see you around @soa , glad you are interested in my projects.

The parsing library can be used for a lot of things, it's similiar to what my mastery skill calculator uses but improved and in a different language/framework.
I'm sure one could build something like TQDB.net with it, maybe I'll look into it myself some day.

The editor does require the mono version of godot as I rely on my libraries.
I've just pushed the first preview of the TQDB-Editor v0.9.
You should not need to install the .NET 6 runtime as it is shipped self-contained. But you do need the C++ redis.
Keep in mind that there is also some optimisation to be done and the size of the binary will hopefully decrease later.

Give it a try and get in touch if anything is broken (expect it to be).
It'll be interesting to see which features the editor will have, you mentioned copy handle and drag&drop but also filtering and infos, I like all of these!
For now you will be able to browse your database and open the dbr files, editing values is just string edit at the moment but finding inside a file (File->Find) should work quite well.