Hey!
I'm about to start my journey with modding, and I was wondering... What tools do you people use not to get lost in this XML files labirynth. Also what IDE do you use for C#? I'm very familiar with C++, but I haven't tried C# yet. I know they are quite vastly different, but I'm optimistic about that.
I am both linux and windows user.
I also think how can I automise updating mods for modpacks. Some XML understanding tool would be great in order to make adjustments I made to make mod fit the pack. Re-doing it everytime I want to update the work seems like bad idea and bad spent time. I wonder whether writing python scripts understanding XMLs and changing the fields I want into the shape I want for each file is a good idea. In a long run I'd like my modpack to be updated frequently, with always up to date components.
Also I wonder which tool could I use to edit XML files comfortably and quickly without having to look for everything for too long. I think that Kdevelop on linux should be nice with understanding XML tags and making searches easy. Maybe you have better suggestions?
Do you, fellow experienced modders and developpers have any suggestions or just general tips? I'm aware about modding tutorials on the wiki. Share your precious modding knowledge for even more and greater mods to appear!
Cheers,
zenfur
RimworldWiki's Recommended software (http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Modding_Tutorials/Recommended_software) page for the first few questions.
I personally use visual studio for all coding, it really is an excellent ide
Visual Studio is quite powerful, yes, including editing xml. Might miss a compare option, but there might even be plugins for that to find on the gallery.
It's got split windows, full keyboard shortcuts for everything, post build scripting, search/replace options (open files, project lvl, solution lvl), etç...
Express free 2013 version proposed in tutorials does the job.
Also, a nice tool I used in the past for xml specifically, is altova xmlspy, but it's a shareware.
Thank you for all the responses, I'll pick something out of these :) Didn't notice that wiki page before.
I personally use Notepad++, whether for standard text, XML mods, or C# Unity stuff. It also has a lot of useful plugins. For Linux I mainly used Kate or Gedit for shell scripting, and SublimeText when experimenting with Linux/Unity. Not much experience there, but I would definitely recommend looking at Notepad++ when using windows. I personally can't stand any C# IDE, or the amount of RAM they use (Np++ uses 1/10 the amount of VS express). The only feature I'm missing out on is better Intellisense with Unity.
For updating(windows & Np++), I find what I need to change then Ctrl+H to replace, as well as Shift+Ctrl+Arrows to organize lines(A12 saw shadow info move into graphicData). For Linux, you could probably just use grep | sed to replace the lines, but moving lines and adding categories would take a little work
JetBrains dotPeek
notepad++
Visual Studio
Xamarin Studio (for mono runtime specific natives and stuff, VS config to run custom runtime is pain)
ram - if you want everything running at once without swapping - 16gb is mandatory, if you want really fast searching\code browsing you will need SSD or sacrifice part of ram for ramdrive