Console Commands

This is the repository for the Console Commands mod, an unofficial developer's console for Fractal Softworks' indie space combat game Starsector. You can find the official forum thread for this mod, including installation instructions, here. Documentation for this mod can be found here. The remainder of this readme is for those who wish to contribute to this mod's development.

Setting up your development environment

Console Commands uses Git for source control and Gradle for building and packaging the mod. The following instructions should be enough to get you started with both.

A Gradle wrapper is included in this repository that will handle downloading and installing Gradle for you. You will need to manually set a few properties, but that will be covered later.

For Git, many programs are available for those who prefer a GUI, but often developers prefer to use the command line version. On Linux the command line version is almost universally included in the base OS package, so no additional download is necessary.

To download and build the mod, follow these steps:

• Download and install the Java Development Kit (JDK), found here. Make sure you grab the JDK and not the JRE! Any JDK >= 7 should work.
• Open your IDE of choice and ensure that a plugin enabling Gradle support is installed. If you are using Eclipse or Netbeans, you may also want to search for and install the Kotlin plugin (IntelliJ includes native Kotlin support). The Kotlin plugin is only required if you intend to work on one of these files. Gradle should be able to compile the mod without a plugin, but you might not have editor support for Kotlin syntax.
• Download the mod's project files. Most IDEs allow you to import a project directly from an online repository. The repository URL is https://github.com/LazyWizard/console-commands.
  • If your IDE does not support importing from GitHub and you are using a Git GUI, most allow you to simply right-click an empty folder and clone a repository there using the context menu.
  • If you prefer to use the command line, you can also clone the repository by opening a command prompt or terminal, navigating to your chosen folder, and running git clone https://github.com/LazyWizard/console-commands.
  • Alternatively, if you don't wish to use Git you can download the repository manually using this link. Be aware that this will make it far more difficult to submit patches and keep your repository up to date, so it's highly recommended to use Git if you intend to contribute.
• Make a copy of local.properties.example in your downloaded repository and name it local.properties. Open this file and set the first property to point at your JDK's root folder, and the next two properties to point at your Starsector install folder (or starsector-core on Windows) and LazyLib jar respectively. These properties are used by Gradle to find the libraries needed to build the mod.

That's it, you should be set and ready to compile! Provided you have a Gradle plugin installed, your IDE should be capable of opening the file build.gradle as a project. The Gradle task to build the mod is, oddly enough, named 'buildMod'. The generated mod folder will be placed in build/mod (this can be changed in local.properties if you wish for it to use your actual mod folder).

If you don't use an IDE, simply run gradlew.bat (on Windows) or ./gradlew (on Linux/Mac) in a command prompt or terminal and Gradle will do all of the work of compiling and assembling the mod for you. As stated above, the generated mod folder will be placed in build/mod by default. Note that the very first time you run the Gradle wrapper it will download several hundred megabytes of required libraries, but subsequent builds will be much faster.

Working with the code

Console Commands' codebase is mainly Java, with a few core components written in Kotlin. The source code can be found in src/main with separate directories for each language. All command implementations should be written in Java, but any other class is coder's choice. Classes can freely reference each other regardless of language, with some caveats.

Loose mod files such as mod_info.json can be found in src/main/mod. These will be copied over to the generated mod folder using the buildMod task.

Any extra files that should be included in the jar should go in src/main/resources. At the moment this only includes this project's license.txt.

Submitting contributions

TODO: describe the workflow of forking, cloning, branching, and submitting a pull request.