I’ve in the recent past used tools that generate a skeleton project for web frameworks or other kinds of software projects. So I thought it might be a good idea to write a helper app that can bootstrap a CC2 mod.

I’ve not put down any code yet, but my ideas are:

• Auto generate a stub mod containing a mod.xml, thumbnail and create the empty folders
• Let you select another mod to use as a template (if you know the git repo of it – eg UI Enhancer, Revolution, Hi-res Screens etc)
• Let you select parts of the SDK to use as a template

A little app like this would probably be one I’d write in python and upload to pypi so it could be installed easily via pip.

It along with the included mod compiler (build_context.exe) it has given me another idea though. What if we thought of the various lua changes people want to do to the screens and HUD as modular chunks of code you could “compile” into a packed up mod?

Each of the screens, interaction script and the HUD load the library*.lua files first (I forget exactly which order they load) So it is possible to put all of the mod changes that would normally be made to a library_* file into a replacement function/global in the screen or hud file instead.

I’ll get working on the tool for generating a stub project and see what comes out in the wash.