Lax:
Is there a good place to get some guidance on developing Inner Space Extensions? I know that there is a community at isxgames.com that sells extensions for specific games, but it doesn't appear to have much in the form of information to an aspiring developer.
I'd hate to bug you on IRC with every little question I had, if there were a good spot to get search for answers myself.
For now, I'm mainly interested in how I push information (text and graphical) to overlay on top of the game screen at a relatively quick rate. I'm sure that I could probably write much of it as a script, but I also want to use this as an exercise to get an extension up and running so that I can expand on it. Also, if it 's possible to develop in C# versus C++, it'd provide a good little project to get familiar with C#.
Thanks!
Innerspace Extension Support
Moderators: Lavish Software Team, Moderators
The best place to go really is on IRC, in the #ismods channel (which is active, whereas ismods.com is not). You can ask questions in there and I'm in there along with some other people who develop extensions. If you're looking to save me time, asking in IRC is better than asking on the forums (since the conversation is delayed I end up writing a lot of extra crap in forum posts, emails, etc), and it'll get you helped quicker to boot.
As far as the overlay, it depends on what kind of graphics you're thinking. The easiest way to display anything is going to be through LavishGUI.
There's a huge difference between coding in C++ (an extension) versus coding in C# (a .net app that will be loaded in the process). Really in the end it depends on what you want it to actually do. One of the main reasons you might develop a C++ extension over a C# app is if you need to create LavishScript datatypes to allow script writing in LavishScript, which can also be wrapped in C#. If you dont need LavishScript datatypes, you're probably better off developing in C#, and in that case you can pretty much avoid LavishScript in favor of C# interop.
Either way you're looking at a lot of work
As far as the overlay, it depends on what kind of graphics you're thinking. The easiest way to display anything is going to be through LavishGUI.
There's a huge difference between coding in C++ (an extension) versus coding in C# (a .net app that will be loaded in the process). Really in the end it depends on what you want it to actually do. One of the main reasons you might develop a C++ extension over a C# app is if you need to create LavishScript datatypes to allow script writing in LavishScript, which can also be wrapped in C#. If you dont need LavishScript datatypes, you're probably better off developing in C#, and in that case you can pretty much avoid LavishScript in favor of C# interop.
Either way you're looking at a lot of work