Rise of Nations Script Maker 2.0
I’ve been working on a new version of my Script Maker for Rise of Nations since the release of the Extended Edition a few months ago. I naively thought it just was going to be a matter of converting the code to .Net and updating a few routines to support EE. However, once I saw the state of the code, I decided it was going to have to be completely rewritten. After all, it was ten year old code written in VB6. And I was really appalled by the “hackiness” of so much of the code—mostly because VB6 had so few built-in functions and relied on the Windows API so much.
So since I was rewriting the whole program anyways, I took the opportunity to make numerous improvements. I won’t post the whole changelog, but here are some of the highlights:
- Streamlined the interface significantly
- Stat tables now support filtering, sorting, and better change highlighting
- Broke the stat tables up by units, buildings, and techs while combining disabling and researching with stats
- Scripts can now have descriptions
- All data is loaded from the games now
- Changed the script save format to XML
- Dropped the use of the MSXML library in favor of .Net’s XML library
At this point, I’m mainly just doing testing and documentation. So, expect release within the next couple of weeks. I may put a call out for beta testers before then, but I haven’t decided yet.
