adding objects with out mouse

[vasf_jeffs 0]

Ok this might sound a little crazy, but I'm looking to find a way with shortcut keys to add objects.  Back in the old wrpedit days I was able to use macros to copy and paste objects into the editor from excel.  this came in really handy for long roads, fences, and random positioning of "clutter".  Any of you know how to bring up the object placement with out clicking it on the gui?  Thanks in advance.

[Synide 0]

I don't believe there are shortcuts to get to 'View>Panel of Objects' or 'Tools>Artificial Objects' but like most windows based applications standard gui keyboard nav. is still possible...

alt-v - opens the 'View' application menu for instance.

alt-t - opens the 'Tools' application menu.

tab - shifts focus between controls on forms/dialogs.

F4 - when the focus is on a drop-down list pressing F4 will activate the 'drop-down' allowing you to navigate it's contents.

these any many more are just standard windows gui nav key-combinations... I can imagine getting your Windows macro software to insert objects this way would be rather tedious... but give it a whirl by all means...

perhaps if you want to input lots of objects from an external excel spreadsheet it might be better for you to write a V3 script that will read a .csv and do the 'work' for you...

This is the method that the Mapfact guys are using to populate a .pew with stuff generated from there upcomming 3DE editor as I understand it.

The only drawback with inserting objects via script in V3 is there is currently no scripting function to allow for the scale of an object.

Also, the V3 scripting can be cumbersome & extremely slow.

I recently insert 240,000 objects via script which took the better part of 1/2 hour on wee machine.

This can only be addressed by injecting objects into the .pew directly using a purpose built 3rd party application - with this method you have complete control over every aspect of a V3 objects position,rotation & size plus all other properties.

Inserting objects directly into the .pew can be much quicker (I recently inserterd the above mentioned 240,000 objects using this method in about 30 seconds) but alot more difficult to do...

[Auss 208]

To cut down on the tedious work of adding plants, I made all the small plants appear as clutter (for my jungles). This way all I need to do is "paint" the mask with the clutter color and then re-compile the map. The downside of this is AI will see you through the ground clutter so I didnt use large plants only very small plants. As you can see in the pic all the grasses and small plants are clutter only. The hardest part is deciding on what plants to use and then adjusting the sizes.