Dolly the ship (or cloning ships for fun and profit)

################## NO LONGER SUPPORTED OR UPDATED ##########################

use SEToolbox https://forums.keenswh.com/post/?id=6638984 instead.



Welcome to the thread about Space editor, a tool for exporting, cloning and generally mucking about with ships.

You can always find the latest version here: https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/category/coding/space-editor/

Okay, here's a quick tutorial for v2.x.x

First BACK UP YOUR SAVE DATA. Space editor is not feature, or stability tested to any great degree. If it destroys your save and you don't have a backup then... well, I'm sorry.

Save games for space engineers are usually found somewhere like:

c:\users\USERNAME\.AppData\Roaming\Space Engineers\Saves\some_long_number\name of save game\

and the ship / entity data is in the file 'SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbs'

The Space Editor Application needs to go in the same folder as your space engineers executable (usually something like c:\program files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SpaceEngineers).

Okay, with that out of the way.....

Loading a savegame

Fire up space editor and you should see a list of your current savegames. Right click on one of them and select 'load' to load it (right click menus are used for just about everything in space editor)

Other Options for a savegame

Save: does what it says on the tin, prompts whether you want to overwrite the current savegame
Make Copy: creates a backup copy of your savegame (after prompting you for a name for it)
Import ship: imports a previously exported ship into this savegame.

Once the savegame is loaded, you can expand it to see 'Ships / Stations' and 'Asteroids / Moons'. Currently, you can't really do anything with Asteroids / Moons so lets just expand 'Ships Stations' and see what we have there.

You should see a list of Ships and stations in the current savegame (assuming you have any). For each ship the number in [] shows how many blocks make up this ship, and if there's a double asterisk at the end of the line (eg: "Large Ship [26]**) then this is the ship your character is currently piloting.

Right click on any ship and you get access to the following options (you'll need to save afterwards for most of these to take effect)

Export: Saves this ship to disk, from where it can be re-imported to another savegame, or shared with other people.
Toggle Static: (large ships / stations only) basically toggles whether this object is a large ship or a station
Delete: Removes the object from the savegame
Move: Pops up a form that lets you set the X,Y and Z location of this object (useful if you want to import another copy of an object into the same file)
Regenerate IDs: Each object in space engineers has its own unique entity ID. If you have 2 blocks with the same ID in the same file (ie: when you re-import multiple copies of the same ship into one file) this causes problems. So you need to regenerate the IDs of each ship.... this option allows you to do that.
Remove Pilot: In the current (26/11/2013) version of space engineers there seems to be problems with save games in which you're piloting a ship. This option safely removes the pilot from any ship, and sets his location to 0,0,0 (alos turns his jetpack on etc).

 

Sounds great! Keep up the good work!

 

Not bad!

 

Progress report: We have saving!

I can currently do all of the following:

Clone a ship within a world
Export a ship to a file
Load a ship from a file

It is however still a bit rough around the edges. At the moment when I clone a ship I just increment all the Entity IDs by 1... which causes problems when you start loading multiple copies of that ship. I need to find a better way of generating IDs, probably some sort of random algorithm.

It's also pretty slow at loading the bigger worlds. That one with 3 copies of the red ship takes a few minutes to load. Having said that my PC is pretty old, so it might just be that.

Anyway, I'll be releasing it 'as is' later today.

 

Progress report 2: entity ID issue fixed, executable released!

So, I've not released the source yet since it's pretty messy...but you can grab the executable from here:

https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/2013/10/27/spaceeditor-released/

Enjoy.

 

I love you. :3

 

This tool works beautifully, though for some bizarre reason the starting platform started floating away.

 

I did actually notice this myself once during testing... I suspect I'm transposing one of the variables somewhere during the import / export process. Glad everything else works for you though. I'm looking at ways to improve performance at the moment, I'm aware it's a tad slow as yet

 

Okay, I think I've improved the loading speed by a fair amount, I've updated the download link here:

https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/2013/10/27/spaceeditor-released/

So anyone who's already downloaded it, if you could try this new version and let me know if it's noticeably faster I'd appreciate it.

Cheers!

 

Yeah, it's working a lot faster now; exporting a 5000 block ship in half the time it took to export a 1300 block ship

 

Nice! Great, great work! I was search some like this!

 

first of great tool


second i would love to see a ship deleter much like the cloner but remover for ship entity's.

again great job on the tool.

 

Ah yeah, I forgot to deleting in!

Just getting some tea, check back in an hour or so

 

Suggestion i would like if the export button auto defaulted to %appdata%/spaceengineers/export <-- making an installer to create this folder could work.
and the save and load buttons auto defaulted to %appdata%/spaceengineers/save

it would make it faster to open and save stuff.


Thanks again.

 

Very nice

 

New release: https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/2013/10/28/space-editor-0-8-2-released/

Adds delete button, show entity type in treeview, preliminary support for loading character data.

 

Awesome Thank you !!

 

No new version today (yet) but I've released the source code:

https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/2013/10/29/space-editor-open-sourced/

 

Awesome work and exactly what I need. Also, thanks for releasing the source code - going to come in handy if I ever decide to develop any tool for SE myself (a kind of structure generator comes to mind...).

 

New version, get it while it's hot:

https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/2013/10/29/space-editor-0-8-5/

Edit positional data of any object
New layout (most actions are available via right click)
Auto update feature (checks for any update when you launch it, prompts you to download if there is one)

 

I vote deicist to have the title/achievement: Engineerus Maximus!

 

Aaaaaaaand here's v0.8.6, which adds symmetrical / mirror building (you need to know which axis you want to mirror across)

https://www.tall-paul.co.uk/2013/10/29/space-editor-0-8-6/


And with that, I'm off to bed!

Edit: ugh, I've just worked out a neat way of doing 'modular' ships...so you can create a ship that's (for example) a reusable hangar bay or whatever, then import that into other ships. But I'm not implementing it now, I need sleep

 

Really kicking ass with this, sir.

Since day one I've wanted features like this and you delivered. All of the internets go to you.

 

As a note...
This program turns stations into large ships.
Glad a made a backup of my save before using it.
Also, Letting us see what ship we've selected would be wonderful, Thanks!

 

Yeah I noticed that when my imported station got torn up by its asteroid and was floating very slowly away. Station blocks are anchored to their coordinates and have asteroid penetration privileges. Also stations can be connected together to make one station out of two. That's not possible with something that rotates and moves.

I'm excited about the modular ship parts though...

 

Just wanted to drop by and report how fantastic your application is. I'm really excited to see how this program develops over time.

It allowed me to paste in a 24,000 block ship into one of my saved worlds with no problems.

​

 

Apologies for that! I didn't realise Large ships and stations were handled differently....

0.8.7 is out now, it fixes this problem.

Also, old versions 'displaced' entities when you exported / imported them (basically moved them 50 units in the Y axis). I've changed this behaviour so it only happens when cloning an entity in the same world now.


My ToDo list is currently:

Allow moving player character between world and selected ships (basically to take control of any ship), this will also allow loading worlds in which you're currently piloting a ship

Modular ship parts (this is actually pretty tricky, but I have a vague idea of an approach, just need to sink some time into getting it working)

 

Glad to hear it, bet that took a while to import

 

Brilliant! I can now import/export frigates to my frigate carrier... (Goes off to remove some memory from his save ).

You just added mirror.... (faints)

(gets back up). Love it!

Currently testing it on my 81k monster!

[edit]
Hmmm, 30 mins later it's still exporting... ops:

 

Definitely had a good amount of waiting to do while importing and overwriting the save file. Takes around 10-15 minutes to complete. But after about an hour you can get something like this:

(Sorry for the Image Spam)​