Possible Features for a Tools Utility

from Sins Forums
Hey all. I'm looking at the possibility of making an editor utility for the .entity / .whatever plain text mod files in order to assist modders in working with many different files and file searching.

Working with the files may be slightly more complicated than it needs to be because the files aren't XML, but it should be doable.

Would anyone be interested in something like this? If so, what sorts of features are most important to you?

If I did go forward with this, the first release would be pretty bare-bones and not have a lot of functionality.
modding
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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Update to this:

Feedback was not overwhelming (contacted by two people, I think), but I wanted to do something different and see where it took me.

I took a scenic route about it (stopping to evaluate performance and try some validation capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation), but I've made a working prototype that allows the user to open, edit, and save .string files (strings definition files). That's not that useful, but it's a start.

Next I'm going to pick a specific type of .entity file and add support for those as well and slowly work my way to an integrated development environment for modding Sins.

Any suggestions as to what types of .entity files would be the most useful to have an editor for?

Valid entity types are (grabbed these using a routine I just wrote):

Ability
Buff
CannonShell
CapitalShip
Debris
EmpireWindowNode
EntryVehicle
Fighter
Fleet
Formation
Frigate
MissionAttackPlanet
MissionColonize
MissionExplore
MissionRaid
PipCloud
Planet
PlanetBonus
PlanetConnection
PlanetModuleStandard
PlanetModuleShipFactory
PlanetModuleHangarDefense
PlanetModuleWeaponDefense
PlanetModuleRefinery
PlanetModuleTradePort
Player
Quest
ResearchSubject
ResourceAsteroid
Squad
Star
Weapon