15: RMMVL

 Aaaand im back again!

... Only took like, what, a month?

Anyways, I've started working on a pretty neat project recently: a custom plugin loader for rpg maker! Why would anyone need this when rpg maker has a perfectly functional plugin loader that's already integrated with the engines editor? Uh... 

Anyways, you should go check it out!

https://github.com/AtIgnister/rmmvLoader

Alrighty, lemme actually explain the point of this thing. Basically, i recently started looking at rpg makers source code out of sheer boredom and discovered something: RPG Maker doesn't actually have a plugin loader. Yes, you heard me right. The only thing that happens when you add a plugin to your game is that it literally just adds it to a big array, and then loops through all the names in the array and adds them as script tags, with the directory they're in literally just being a static string. ... Y'know, i feel like we can do better than that. Now, I'm not just making things more complicated for the sake of it. There's actually some fun stuff you can do once you've got a plugin loader that doesn't suck quite as badly. Like...

- Not just having to dump every plugin file into the same directory

- Having multiple separate plugin directories

- Being able to install plugins globally, and have them auto enabled without screwing with newdata files

- Package management

- actual dependencies

- Plugins made up of multiple files that don't require you to install each of them separately

- disabling/enabling every plugin from a certain author

- loading plugins while the game is running

Now, this is just a list of what is possible. I haven't implemented any of these except for the first bullet point, i started the project like two days ago and have been very busy with irl stuff. Buuuut, I'll try to get as many of these done as i can. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the future of this thing though. Because RPG maker's """plugin loader""" is so primitive, the actual, well... Plugin loading already works flawlessly. Now i just need to add, y'know, everything else. Including plugin parameters. Haven't added support for changing those yet. Oh, and enabling/disabling plugins without manually editing a json file. Alright, i may still have a bunch of work i need to do. But hey! The basics work! Go and try it if you feel like spending too much time editing json files!

https://github.com/AtIgnister/rmmvLoader