SHED 1.3.2 (Unofficial) +Effect Editor!

SHED (Stonehearth Editor) is a standalone application to help make modding easier.

Download Instructions

  1. Go to Releases · ziebelje/shed · GitHub
  2. Click the green download button for the latest release
  3. Extract the downloaded files into a folder
  4. Double-click the icon named shed.exe to run

New Features for 1.3

  • Drag & drop to install mods on the mod manager screen
  • Switch mods from anywhere
  • Stonehearth launcher
  • Progress indicator when packing / unpacking / installing mods
  • Overwrite warnings when packing / unpacking / installing mods
  • Added natural sorting algorithm for mod list and effects/tracks list
  • Improved error logging (1.3.1)

Bug Fixes for 1.3

  • Generally prevented a lot of random issues on the mod management screen caused by a lack of error handling
  • Fixed legacy settings strings (pre 1.3) breaking application (1.3.2)

Current Features

  • 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
  • Load entities into the Effect Editor
  • Game launcher with profiles
  • Mod library?
  • Template library?
  • Lots more…

THIS IS A GIF. CLICK TO PLAY IT

THIS IS A GIF. CLICK TO PLAY IT

27 Likes

First piece of feedback.

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.

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absolutely killer stuff here @jonzoid… thanks for putting together what I know will be an immensely helpful tool! :smile: :+1:

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Got it! I’ll add some way to manually set the installation path / mods folder.

Soooo… What is SHED supposed to be?

I’ll be sure to give this a try once I get on my gaming computer.

Probably stands for Stalking Herds of Ethernet Demons. Am I rait?

You mean Sheep Hell of Eternal Doom, right? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I think @RepeatPan would agree

Yep, probably right. Sounds more sensible.

Hang on a minute, that mod looks awfully familiar.
Oh wait, It’s mine. That’s an awesome idea though.

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Ok, fun’s over everyone! :smile:

Around the 30 minute mark of the last stream (Twitch), we find that SHED stands for “Stonehearth Editor”.

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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.

3 Likes

@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.

1 Like

I’d like to launch Microworld from within SHED.

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.

Quote from @wizaerd (May '14):

Edit: it’s a 64bit build? I can’t test it. Maybe in the future… :disappointed_relieved:

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Yea, same problem for me. Where do you exactly add that filepath?

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In the js/view/mod_manager.js file. I tried adding it between lines 188/189, in the possible_paths array.

(But in the end I wasn’t able to run it, apparently because it’s for 64 bits or something :disappointed_relieved:)

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.

2 Likes

@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! :slight_smile: Thanks again for all the comments.

1 Like

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
  • Cleaned up some UI

They should have written the engine, then the editor and finally the game :confused: one of the downsides to kickstarting I guess…