Keeping the momentum going on the ModMaker project, i've been working on the 1.3 build this week. Headline features are Face Poser, Sound Scripter and a VGUI RES editor.
The RES editor continued to be an SOB, taking most of the week's free time. It's now working to my satisfaction. I can think of a few more refinements that could be added, but I think this is OK for a 1st release. The idea is to let you drag and drop VGUI panels in the editor like you would forms and controls in Visual Studio. You can also set any of the properties of a selected panel and add new panels of standard VGUI types.
Bit of a warning about the RES editor. It does not retain any comments in the files, so any files you edit will loose their comments. In a future version I might add a C++ script generator like the one in the FGD editor to write the boilerplate C++ for an editable panel to use your RES file.
One of the ideas that sprang out of the last version is adding a shortcut to the solution file when a new mod is created. It's a little thing, but it should smooth your way,
Brainstorming helper functions also came up with the Sound Scripter utility, which looks for loose sound files that you haven't scripted yet and makes scripts for them. Saves some time writing boilerplate sound scripts and adding them to the manifest. I got really lazy with the UI for this, so it basically just reports the results when it's done.
Be aware that if the Sound Scripter cannot find a game_sounds_manifest.txt in the scripts folder it will create a new one (which will override the default one in the VPK and prevent any other sound scripts from being cached). So it is very important to to extract the default game_sounds_manifest.txt before starting the utility. I would like to find a way to improve on this but that would require lower level technologies like mounting VPKs, which i'm not really interested in. Like the RES editor it also does not preserve comments in the scrip files it modifies.
The final new feature in 1,3 is a launcher for Face Poser in 2013 mods, which I had overlooked in previous versions for the simple fact that i'd never touched the damn thing before.
I'm still procrastinating about recording tutorials. I should really get around to that one day.
