beyond-all-reason / beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine

Do something about loose LuaUI files in default engine installation

Open
#1,483 11 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
area: Basecontent enhancement game compat
Dominant language
C++
Stars
679
Forks
290
Avg merge
3d 2h
Merged PRs (30d)
40

Description

The engine installation comes with a bunch of loose LuaUI files (these https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring/tree/BAR105/cont/LuaUI ).

This presents two problems:
* games rely on those files, which is fragile because they are undocumented and just happen to work. But players can just delete or overwrite them etc., it's just a ticking distribution bomb. They should be in some sort of basecontent-level archive for checksum etc.
* many of these files are of very low quality. So just dumping them in an archive would waste a good opportunity to improve them.
* it's also an opportunity to make it more newbie-dev friendly. Apparently the loose files are not enough for an empty mod to recognize a widget placed in `./luaui/widgets` out of the box, which is bad.

The first task here is probably to make sure that existing games won't break if we touch these files. Make PRs to games so they have a local copy, or figure out what's safe to modify.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the loose LuaUI files in `cont/LuaUI` and identify which games rely on them, as the issue calls out compatibility as the first task. Determine whether those games need local copies or whether any files are safe to modify; done means existing games continue to work while the files’ future handling is clear.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
game-dev
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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