FG Studio

From FGWiki

This is a temporary page for holding information about FG Studio. FG Studio is a Digital Adventures community project to provide developer tools for building Fantasy Grounds rulesets and extensions. The project has three components:

• A plug-in language service, allowing Lua script files to be edited within Visual Studio (LuaScript);
• A separate development environment, using the Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell redistributable, hosting the Lua script language for developers who do not currently have VS 2008 (FG Studio); and
• Project types, deployment projects and other packages for creating new rulesets and extensions.

All of the tools are freely available (and unsupported!) but subject to Microsoft's Visual Studio redistributable licensing terms. This project is being resourced only occasionally, so please be patient for updates.

For more information on how Visual Studio can be extended and redistributed, see the Visual Studio Extensibility page.

LuaScript

The first part of the project is at an early beta stage. The LuaScript add-in can be installed by downloading the file Media:LuaScriptSetup-0.1.0.zip, unzipping it and then running the MSI installer file. It has been designed for use with Visual Studio 2008 Standard edition or higher, but I'd welcome users' feedback on whether it runs on older versions of Visual Studio.

The language service recognises .lua files in a VS project, and provides syntax coloring and auto-indenting. It does not yet autoindent code pasted from the clipboard, 'undo' operations for autoformatting, nor does it support outlining (collapsible code). We hope to add these in due course.

Please note that the installer and Lua plug-in are provided 'as-is' and neither I nor Digital Adventures accepts any liability if your hard drive is trashed, your registry corrupts, your computer blows up or the world comes to an end, directly or indirectly as a result of installing or using this software.

FG Studio 2008

The FG Studio download link has been removed, as the program isn't yet sufficiently stable for testing. Stuart

The second part of the project is at an early alpha stage. The FG Studio development environment includes the most recent version of the LuaScript language service, so you only need to install FG Studio to have Lua scripting access.

If you don't already have Visual Studio 2008 (Standard edition or higher) installed, you must first install the Visual Studio 2008 Shell (Isolated Shell) Redistributable. This is a two-stage install:

• Download the redistributable installer from the Microsoft Isolated Shell Redistibutable page (384MB) and run the installer to unpack the redistributable.
• Once the redistributable is installed (unpackaged), you'll need to install the isolated shell runtime itself by double-clicking on the vs_shell_isolated.enu.exe file

FG Studio can then be installed - it is a small program (320KB), but needs the shell runtime which is quite substantial (384MB) if Visual Studio isn't already installed.

Please note that the installer and FG Studio application are provided 'as-is' and neither I nor Digital Adventures accepts any liability if your hard drive is trashed, your registry corrupts, your computer blows up or the world comes to an end, directly or indirectly as a result of installing or using this software.

FG Studio Project Types

The final piece in the jigsaw is creating project types, which allow users to select skeleton ruleset and extension projects upon which to build. The current environment supplies two such project types, blank ruleset and blank extension, which provide the bare minimum. Once these are working properly (they aren't yet) I'd like to move on to something a bit more pre-populated, like the foundation ruleset.

Deployment projects will create ruleset or extension installers, and I'm some way from that goal.