Coronavirus quarantine hackathon results
Added 2020-04-08 20:30:49 +0000 UTCHey fellow friends of VUEngine,
so, our two weeks off from Formula V development are already over, oh how time passes by! As promised, here's our results. Ordered by time of achievement and, coincidently, also by their level of interestingness one might say. ;-) OK, let's start small:
Project 1: VUEngine Studio: "New VUEngine Class" dialogue
When we started poking around with new blank projects, we noticed that our copy-and-paste way to create new classes was a bit unelegent. So, as a little quality-of-life feature, we added a dialogue to VUEngine Studio to create a blank new VUEngine class.
Project 2: VUEngine Studio: Automatic tools download
VUEngine Studio has a bunch of binary dependencies for full functionality, like compiler, emulator, image converter and more. For various reasons, we don't want to include those files in the extension package. Those who have already set up an early version of VUEngine Studio have had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get everything working and know that manually settings things up can be a bit tedious and error-prone.
In the past year or so, we have tried a few different ways to automate things as much as possible to make the initial setup as easy as we can. None of these methods has really been satisfying or even reliable, though. So, last week, we ended up having another look at the problem and implemented a downloader that grabs all the dependencies for your system on installation or activation of the extension and installs them.
With this in place, plus some adjustments to the extension configuration structure, VUEngine Studio will work out of the box, without requiring any manual setup, like you're used to from the good old VBDE.
Project 3: VUEngine Dungeon Crawler
With the latest and greatest VUEngine Studio in place, we also had fun throwing together something playable. Imaginatively titled "VUEngine Dungeon Crawler", this small game demo could be best described as Insmouse with larger levels. You can find a playable demo attached to this post if you want to have a look.
