Fireaxis spent how much making ModBuddy?

[gladoscc]

I just installed modbuddy, and wow, it looks like a professional IDE. The editing has all sorts of cool features, it is way better than Adobe Flash. Autocomplete is actually helpful, unlike in flash where it appears half of the time I want to.

There's lots of UI improvements as well.. Meanwhile, I'm looking at the Adobe Flash IDE, and all I get is notepad with line numbers and syntax highlighting.

Seriously, how long has fireaxis spent making a free IDE that is superior to a thousand dollar IDE?

 

[PawelS]

It's based on Microsoft Visual Studio, so they didn't have to create an IDE from scratch.

 

[CivOasis]

Autocomplete? Anyone want to elaborate on this?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Autocomplete? Anyone want to elaborate on this?

When you're typing an XML table, any table names or schema names you close with a > (instead of a />) will automatically generate the corresponding closing statement. So type <Row> and a </Row> will immediately appear after it.
Also, when you go to close an entry, typing the </ will bring up a list of things you can close, with the tabularly correct one listed first. Not very useful, but it's there.

 

[PawelS]

The only IDE-related problem I found so far is the SQL syntax checking - sometimes it marks valid (and working in the game) commands as invalid, for example my "city shuffling" code.

 

[human machine]

The autocomplete is nice, but unfortunetly it happily completes a misspelled schema. too bad they didn't include a list of approved xml elements.

of course SQL and SQLight's error checking makes it unnecessary

 

[Spatzimaus]

too bad they didn't include a list of approved xml elements.

That'd defeat the entire point of using XML, so of course they didn't. We CAN create custom tables/schema, after all, and if it'd give error messages every time you typed one of those in, it'd get ridiculous.

 

[human machine]

That's a good point. I was thinking about simple modding that most people want to do to start with (and what I too am doing). But that would get in the way when they might want to make something really interesting.

I'll stop whining and spell-check better