Factorio Forums

I've thought about writing a tool that would greatly enhance the creation, edit and deletion of modded items.

Basically you could specify a folder(the mod base) and then use a GUI to select item type, various parameters and what not and it could generate the LUA for all the needed files and drop them out there.

It would also load anything already created to be edited or deleted. It might even be possible to make it extend multiple mods and possibly check for conflicts.

Ideas? Has this already been done?

Thanks for reading!

You should check viewtopic.php?f=135&t=40830

A quote from my Red Alert 2 modding days: "Real modders don't use TibEd."

Even though tools to make mods by clicking buttons and filling checkboxes existed, if you used them you were considered a lazy noob. Putting the opinion to one side...

I'm not totally against such things, but such tools are pretty much limited to whatever functionality has been programmed into them, in this case, creating items. (And I presume by that you mean also entities, recipes, technologies, etc)

One of the hard parts for a program to do, which would be common for things like technologies, is what to do if you simply want to add to an already existing list. Editing an existing file is easy, dynamically adding it in a new file is not so easy, you need to do a lot of checks, like, does it exist, is there an effects section (Not all have an effects section, like advanced electronics 2, and it must be added before you can add an unlock). Then what do you do if any of these checks fail? Needless to say, things get complex in the code, and the program would need to be written in a way to account for all these situations... in a landscape that is constantly changing... Keeping a program to do such things up to date would be one hellish job.