Development Blog

 INI Editor V2 - Intro
Posted by: DCoder - Sat, 2006 Apr 15 - Comments: 3 | Views: 1241
avatar First post! Big Grin

This is supposed to be a blog about my projects' progress. I imagine most of you are waiting for the INI Editor V2, so that's what I'll start with.

I don't have any screenshots to illustrate myself at the moment, so I guess I will simply describe the editor, what its purpose and capabilities are, and how it's different from TibEd / SunEdit:

The INI Checker
INI E V2 (I'll refer to it as just V2 from now on) was conceived as a descendant of the INI Checker. The INI Checker was (and likely still is) the only INI debugging tool, and I believe it has helped a lot of people with their mods. However, when I wrote the INI Checker, I was just a newbie at programming, so now that I look back at its source, I see a zillion places that could be improved. And of course its functionality was pretty limited too.
Soon afterwards, I decrypted some of the RA2's file formats, like CSF, BAG and IDX. Also I kept developing several programs for my own use, and I quickly fell in love with Delphi's IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and its features that help people write code faster and easier. Then I suddenly realised the potential such features would bring to my fellow modders. And so, slightly more than a year ago (!), V2 was born.

INI Editor V2
From the beginning, I envisioned it as the ini editor for the modders. I (as almost every modder worth his salt) have a strong distaste for visual click-and-play modding tools like TibEd, so I promised myself V2 would never lean in that direction.
With that vision and Delphi's IDE as a great example, I came up with ideas that would make this editor a highly valuable and time-saving tool:
  • Observing how often people misspell/miscapitalize their code, I concepted the "Code Templates" tool that can (yeah, you guessed it) insert a full pre-made template at your whim, for example, typing up "newinf" straight in the INI and hitting Ctrl-] would replace that phrase with a full section for a new infantry unit. Of course there are tons of possible templates that different modders use, so all the templates are editable by a user.
  • For those tags that have a list of preset values (like Armor= ), there's a "Code Completion" tool that proposes possible values as you type.
  • Due to Rock Patch, which designates new tags all the time, I couldn't hardcode the tags into the debugger. No, sir. I did something much better - left the tag/value/context/etc. data as a user-editable external file. Firstly, it is much easier to redistribute one file when Rock Patch updates than to redistribute the whole program. Secondly, yeah, users can edit it. I'm just a human, you know, and I can make mistakes too.
  • Seeing the newbies miss the concept of 45=YURI and [Yuri] being completely different entities, I designed a "Code Debugger" (like the one in the INI Checker, only better), that would detect such problems and advise the user how to solve them.
  • Let's not forget the "Debugger" can check your code as you type and advise you immediately, without having to press Ctrl-F9 to see the errors.
  • I'm sure there are lots of other features I didn't mention, and that's intentional - gotta leave something for the future Smile
As you can see, this is designed with an absolutely different goal in mind than TibEd.

Next time, Code Completion in action. :cool:
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