Housing Layout Editor Guide

~by Wilhelmina of the French EQ2Artisans, who kindly created an English translation for us!

The Layout Editor is a tool that uses saved house layouts to manipulate furniture in many ways (rotating, flipping, precise alignment, etc.) that are not always possible with by-hand placement of your furniture.

The Layout Editor, created by Jesdyr, can be found here : http://www.eq2designers.com/

A tutorial, also created by Jesdyr, is also available on Youtube

Finally, this article has been edited to reflect changes made by version 1.7 of the Layout Editor. Any errors that you find are likely the fault of Mum while copying and pasting. :D

How does it work?

While in game, save a layout that we'll call "layout1". (Type /house while standing in the home, and there will be a "save layout" option) Give easy to remember, simple, easy to understand names and without spaces.
Install the layout editor program if you haven't already and launch it.

Open a file

In "File", choose "Open". Find your "saved_house_layouts" folder which is in your EQ2 folder and open "layout1".
In "File, choose "save as" and save as "layout1-work1" for example. Open the this file. Note that the currently loaded file is written at the bottom of the window after "Loaded File - " (or above in version 1.7).
Why do that? Because it'll allow you to retain a copy of your original layout in case you want to go back to it.

Main Window

You'll find there a huge number of columns corresponding to those of the file created by the game.

Scale note: A tile at .5 scale is a "ruler" that shows a single Norrathian unit of space. So if you want to know how much moving an item by "1" would be, put a tile down, shrunk as small as it will go, and you'll see. Or two tiles if you're moving by 2 and so forth, to give you an idea to begin with when trying to plan how much to move things. (Thanks, Enna!)

MultiEdit controls

The right panel is the place when a single item or several can be moved.

Top and bottom buttons

To the top and the bottom of the main window, you'll find buttons and text. Here is what they are :

Menus: File - basic options

Menus: Edit - basic options (1.7 version)

The 1.7 version of the editor moved some options from the main window to a new menu named Edit.
Note that in this version, the temp UID will have a negative value which will allow them to be put in groups.

LAYOUT EDITOR - ADVANCED OPTIONS


We saw the "File" menu with all the basic options. The Tools menu has a lot of options that are not really that easy to understand. Get to know the layout editor before starting on these!

Menus : Tools - advanced options


LAYOUT EDITOR - 1.7 VERSION: GROUPS


Layout editor 1.7 is a major update. It adds a group notion and removes a bunch of boring manual changes.

We saw that it was better to only retain in the layout file the items that are neede or the room we're working on. It cuts down the chances of loading bugs, loading tme and so on. Problem was: if we wanted to add an item, or move one by hand, we had to re-load and re-sort the file to retain only what was needed. 1.7 version solves that.


Layout editor - Tips

Created: 2011-06-30 02:00:52          
Last Modified By: Niami Denmother          
Last Modified on: 2011-08-02 12:07:15          


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