OXCTools

[Warboy1982]

so the past few days i've got it into my head that a modding interface might be a good thing, so i whipped up a little something in my spare time (see attachment).

i'm just wondering... who wants to help?

i've pushed it to a repo HERE.

the project is in it's infancy at the moment, step one will be reading in the YAML and displaying it in the lists. obviously i'll be "borrowing" heavily from the OXC codebase for certain things, like reading .pck files and so on, hence the choice to use C++ for this project.

i hope to integrate the map editor that luke and pmprog are working with as well, i realize this is written in C#, so i'm fine with having it as an unrequired stand alone executable.

created in Qt.

i won't be looking into any translated versions until the software is functionally complete.

[moriarty]

very nice. I'm looking forward to this

[luke83]

Cant wait for this also

[kkmic]

i won't be looking into any translated versions until the software is functionally complete.

I'd say that you don't bother with i18n. Proper modding articles are mostly found in English.

That being said, this is great news for the modding community

[mercy]

Looks like the charm!

[SupSuper]

Looks nice.

Personally I would've just written it in C# so I wouldn't have to worry about libraries and junk (it can still interface with native code), and just to get the OSS community up in arms.

[pmprog]

When I was chatting to Warboy I mentioned if it was C# we could merge it with the map editor and other tools I'm maintaining easier, but he is actually using the .NET framework with C++ so it should still be possible

[Warboy1982]

actually i switched switched to Qt C++, because i have no idea how to use either of them, and the general concensus was that i shouldn't be using .net.

[Yankes]

OSS can use .net too: mono

[myk002]

OSS can use .net too: mono

while that is true, you have to make sure you don't use any microsoft-only libraries.  QT is much more likely to work cross-platform.

[mercy]

Can OXCTools show an Ufopaedia page, like the Sectoid Autopsy image for example and can it render fonts onto such an image?

It would be cool to see new research / discovery related text displayed on top of an artwork in order to calculate word count and maybe let us format the text via the basic  word processing functions: new line, space, etc.

[kkmic]

Warboy, will this tool share code with OXC or it will be completely standalone?

I'm asking because requests like the one above would benefit from the code sharing

Using the same data and renderer will result in the same result all the time, as oposed to having to update the tool if the OXC code changes. OTOH, the ufopaedia is completed and probably it won't change much...

[SupSuper]

Reusing the code would likely be the best approach but also the most complex. OXC code is deeply entrenched in its libraries and dependencies (everything graphic expects SDL surfaces etc.) and I don't think Warboy fancies that when he's trying to make less work for himself.

Plus if he had done it in .NET he could just reuse the loaders from Daishiva's tools, obviously the superior solution.

[pmprog]

Is it worth me looking at porting Daishiva's tools that I'm currently maintaining into QtCreator and Warboy's OXC Tools? I guess this is more of a question for Warboy than anyone else...

I can sort all (most) of Luke's changes out, whilst at the same time keeping us one nice clean tool that can access both original data formats and any new OXC formats

[Warboy1982]

at this point it's all amorphous, i'm not really making any progress in either, because i'm learning as i go, and not many tutorials are dealing with my specific situation. i'm not sure how to even read in the ruleset yaml, apparently Qt can do it natively, or something, but it's a PITA, and i can't figure out how to include the yaml-cpp library, because apparently Qt isn't that kind of girl. so far it's taken me a week to get the tree view populated, and i'm pretty sure i didn't even do that right.