Need suggestions for proof-of-concept IDE plugin

Hey all. Still alive, sort of. I'm currently entertaining a daydream about making an IDE based on plugins for the Netbeans platform (stuff like any of these things) to make it easier to convert textures, write materials and QC files, compile models, pack maps, etc., but I'm not sure if it's feasible or how difficult it would be.

That's why I want to find some relatively small and focused thing which I can work on just to gain familiarity and prove that the underlying stuff can be done. So bearing it mind it might just be a prototype, what kind of plug-in for an existing major IDE platform would get people the most interested and engaged?

Possible "cool stuff" includes:

• Syntax highlighting and error checking
• Automatic formatting/beautification
• Auto-complete/suggest functionality (example)
• Defining and inserting commonly-used code templates

Cool stuff that I don't yet want to look at involves:

• Discovering and analyzing the current SDK/game configuration
• Storing personal settings
• Reading GCF/VPK/NCF files
• Project-types and automatic re-"compilation"
• Displaying VTFs

I'm mainly thinking of it as a text-based editor, although a parallel "node view" is not at all out of the question.

I wouldn't do more than a mock-up at this point, but I'd like to see autocomplete able to feed in filenames, so that if you type "wave" in a soundscape (or "$basetexture" in a VMT) it would show you a list of files that it recognizes either on-disk or inside GCFs.

The only problem with the "compiling" part is that in order to do it well there needs to be configurable infrastructure that knows where studiomdl lives and how to tell when it worked. One of my professional weaknesses seems to be taking on more than I can chew. It remains to be seen if I can stick to the original plan for a "proof of concept".

Most people voted for soundscapes, but I don't want to step on anybody's toes... Then again, it's proof-of-concept, so it doesn't have to matter! Hah! (Gotta keep reminding myself.)

Terr said:

Most people voted for soundscapes, but I don't want to step on anybody's toes... Then again, it's proof-of-concept, so it doesn't have to matter! Hah! (Gotta keep reminding myself.)

Click to expand...

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It was a short poll, but with all the Soundscape votes I'm going to go ahead and try that while I've still got some free time.

Near-term todo:

• Basic syntax highlighting (luckily already did a lot of work to parse the format)
• Report gross parse errors (like missing a quotation mark or culy-brace)
• Improve to warn on unrecognized keys (e.g. "volum")
• Improve to warn on seemingly-wrong values (e.g. "SNDLVL_NOM")