Hello,
I made a cool thing. I wanna talk about it. Here I go.
Some context first
As many of us may know, at least all of us who have been in the community for some time and who tried making addons for C2 with as little JS knowledge as possible, there has been quite a lot of attemps of making addon editors in the past.
I'm not one to judge, and I do highly respect all of the users who attempted this, but in the end most of these didn't really work as well as wanted, making their use more of a pain than a relief.
The main issue is that you can't really simplify the process of making plugins easily without having to tackle a complicated export system. The easier you make it for the user, the harder you make it for you. As wannabe lazy users who just wanna make addons for an engine that revolves all of its power around the fact that you don't need to code it's kind of not what you're bound to do. Therefore it's pretty understandable to see so many attemps, and so few actual results.
What changed since?
Well, yeah. I am a wannabe lazy user who just wants to code as little as possible and automate all of the boring work through a great tool that does the heavy lifting. I wouldn't be using Construct if I didn't correspond to that profile. What makes me different?
Well. Nothing. I'm not the one making the heavy lifting either in fact. Someone else is.
Introducing Code Templater
Code templater is an amazing online tool made by an amazing user named valerypopoff. Go follow his twitter: twitter.com/valerypopoff and check a look at his website, he makes amazing stuff: readymag.com/valerypopoff
Now what does this tool do? In short it allows you to automate the task of writing the same code over different yet similar frameworks.
Mainly "Hey I wanna make a plugin. My plugin has a name, some ACES, some properties, I just wanna code that, and have the tool copy my code over premade templates that contain all of the code that is unique to each framework and most importantly that is mostly the same accross all addons, and thus that I shouldn't need to write."
So Code templater allows you to import a set of instruction files which contain the actual code you wrote, and a set of template files which are written with a given syntax that the tool will recognise and replace with your code. And there you go, you have a thing that generates plugins out of simpler text files.
This is where I come in.
"Wait", I thought, "This thing makes a plugin out of a text file that has simple syntax. I can generate that."
So I decided to make a tool that generates these files that when imported inside Valerypopoff's Code Templater would give you a plugin that should work for C2, C2.3 and C3 runtimes.
It also helped that I was in the middle of learning (to love) Vue and Vuetify and that I happened to have started an editor named Mourn Editor in the past (which was meant to be a whole different thing, think dialogue editor).
As of now the editor is finished, works very fine and can be used to make any plugin that Code Templater's C2 exemple template can make.
That means that the editor doesn't support making behaviors yet, and that it doesn't support dependencies yet. These should come at some point soon.
Try it please
You can get a hold of the editor here:
github.com/skymen/MournEditor
A build link is available in the description. The project is open source, so feel free to look into the code.
If you have any feedback to give, I'd love to hear it in that discord server:
discordapp.com/invite/s7XDEcz