Effect editor (with live editing!): Only renders cubemitter effects but lists others. There are plans to support other track types like light and sound in the future.
Mod manager: List out all current mods, pack/unpack or enable/disable them. Drag/drop to install new mods.
Planned Features
Add additional track type support to the Effect Editor
Your mods install location code was unable to determine that I have a separate hard disk for my games.
I had to manually add ‘D:\Steam\SteamApps\common\Stonehearth’, to mod_manager.js. Luckily for me the code is well written and I was able to find the problem easily enough.
I’ve played around with the idea of extending Jofferson with features like these, seeing as Jofferson can already read and “understand” mod objects. However, there’s some… issues:
Entity references are just pure nightmare stuff. It’s sometimes not possible to determine whether something is a missing reference or just a proprietary name.
It would need to be modular as hell. The huge part would be the components part, it requires one module per component. These would have to be maintained properly too, as components tend to change in-between versions. Because every component is different, it’s very hard to have a one-size-fits-all module to cover them; the best you can do is a module that takes a “component schema” and tries its best to display this data somehow useful.
Most components aren’t (directly) visible - there’s nothing you get from an editor that you wouldn’t get from just editing the values manually.
It’s almost impossible to have a visual editor outside of the game. For example, to have particles, you would need to imitate the particle engine Stonehearth uses in a ridiculously precise way. The same applies for about everything: Model viewers don’t get the lighting properly done, effect editors won’t get the effect feel correctly realised - the list goes on.
In the end, I would opt for some sort of in-game editor, i.e. an editor that is not a standalone but rather uses the game directly. That way, you don’t only have access to all the assets but also have meaningful ways of displaying them.
This is, however, at the moment not really possible. It’s possible to fake-reload JSON files in the lua side, but the engine caches them too - so until there’s some sort of reloadAsset() button, I doubt that there can be a truly complete editor.
Then again, I’ve never been a fan of something clicky-colory if the solution was to open notepad and change one number. It’s much more hassle for me, so I might not be the best person to ask about how useful this could be, in whatever state.
@Tom mentioned it in a stream recently (see OP)… I’m guessing “Stonehearth Editor” or similar. Basically official or quasi-official mod tool(s). If you’ve seen any of the streams, he’s occasionally grumbled at how many steps they need to take to add an item (or w/e) into the game, so if nothing else I expect SHED to go a long way towards automating this and doing all the tedious copy/paste/etc bits.
However, you’ll have to make the qb files and animations with outside programs, and then browse to your files and copy them to your mod folder. Initially, that’s inevitable.
Thanks for the comments, everyone! I want to reply to a lot of them later tonight but just wanted to say that I just pushed a switch to a 32-bit version. That should take care of you, @Relyss.
@RepeatPan I want to build something useful but I want to do it in a way that’s fun and challenging for me. Writing a mod that uses the actual rendering engine to get perfect visual results for something would be ideal, but tedious for me.
I do want to avoid writing useless stuff or creating more problems. A text editor inside SHED probably isn’t the best idea, but a particle editor in WebGL sounds awesome and would probably get you results that are close enough to really help.
I’m not sure what I want to do with entities/components yet. I need to learn a bit more about them first.
@Relyss I was thinking about something like a test world launcher. As long as that’s all achievable via config files, it shouldn’t be too hard. That might be one of the next things I try, depending on when Radiant releases whatever they were talking about recently.
I’m working on some more improvements and will post an update when I’m done! Thanks again for all the comments.
Updated. @Froggy, @Miturion, @Relyss I believe this takes care of your outstanding issues. It now looks for a path, but if it can’t find one you can go into settings and set it yourself.
2015.2.2
Added settings page so you can manually configure Stonehearth installation folder
I think 
)
Thanks again for all the comments.
one of the downsides to kickstarting I guess…