Age of Empires 2 AI script writing extension. This extension provides command/parameter tool-tips and auto-completion suggestions. It will also apply syntax highlighting to any .per files that are loaded in vscode providing a more visually appealing way to . See the 'Experimental Features' section for a list of additional features that are available.
This image demonstrates some of the features described below.
When typing a command or object this will trigger a popup with suggestions for likely objects that you may want. Some commands even have examples demonstrating how to use them. Hitting tab will insert the highlighted object. There is also descriptive text to aid you in deciding which completion you may want. You can also hover over parameters and commands to see the same help text.
When filling a command, a helpful popup provides guidance about what the required parameter types for the command are. The next parameter at your cursor position will be bold and underlined with a description of the parameter.
This extension currently provides very rudimentary syntax highlighting as demonstrated below (image uses the Dark+ color theme):
See this example for how to define your own colors for the different syntax components.
Snippets are also provided to quickly create new rules.
These are features that are considered good enough to be tested by people, but may still need some tweaking. By default experimental features are turned off to ensure the average person has a stable experience with the extension.
To turn them on, go to the settings (Preferences->Settings), search for 'aoe2 ai script' and set the desired feature values. You may need to reload your VSCode instance for your changes to take effect.
Current experimental features:
- Error detection: Detects when there are errors in your scripts and underlines them with red (errors) or green (warnings) squiggly lines. This feature is still VERY experimental. It is advised to keep this off for the time being, unless you REALLY want to test it out.
- Does not test for: Rule length, rule/command closure
- Cannot detect when a GoalId is being used instead of a UnitId, BuildingId, etc...
- load-randoms that have multiple files also fail every time
- Using the ID numbers is also incorrectly flagged
Building the editing features on top of Visual Studio Code offers several benefits:
- VSCode is already used by a large community of developers, meaning that it wont go away any time soon and many existing programmers should already be familiar with it.
- VSCode is cross-platform (it works on Windows, Mac and Linux)
- VSCode has many additional features which don't have to be entirely implemented from scratch, such as:
- code snippets
- basic file editing features, such as searching across all files, find-and-replace, multi-line selection and much more.
- syntax highlighting and user-defined color themes
- intellisense, which is a way to provide code-completion and error-checking
- Developers of the extension can focus on the particulars of the AoE2 AI scripting language and don't have to be concerned with developing the interface.
To be clear, the original author of this code has never used or attempted to use any existing AI script editor, so this is in no way a critique of those editors.
- User defined
defconst's are not included in autocompletion (such asGoalId's)
This is an alpha version after all, so there are going to be issues. For example, missing or incorrect commands/unit/building/tech IDs. If you come across a bug using the extension, please submit an issue to the github repository or via this thread on the aiscripters forums.
Feel free to submit issues to the github repository, and I will try to look into them when I have time.
Alternatively, for the real go-getters out there, you can fork the repository, make changes and submit a pull request!
The following people and resources have contributed a non-trivial amount to the development of this extension. Seriously, this extension would not be as good as it is without them:
- Scripter: Responsible for the userpatch material and related resources that are used by this extension. Whoever you are, you're a legend.
- AiScripters: These guys like complaining when things break, and I love them for it (Aleph & Electricity).
- AiScript resource list: The resource info derives heavily from the resource file made for AiScript
- AoE2 wiki: A lot of extra information for the resources was extracted from this site
Please refer to the CHANGELOG for a reference of changes in this and previous releases.