Moondust Editor modding + where & how to start

[John Nameless]

So backstory:

For my many years using the Moondust Editor, ive felt some various annoyances from unconfigurable shortcut binds, very helpful features being tucked away in obscure menus, the fact that some experimental features like autotiling didnt make the final cut bothered me for ages.

So I would like to take things into my own hands & add those features in myself. More specifically for the SMBX2 Beta 5 iteration of moondust.
(Once I have enough experience with it that is.)

Thus, i'd like to start out something simple like change the text of a menu option to be something else or anything just as simple as that to begin.
But im a bit lost atm on where to start modding moondust & im hoping I can find some people here who dabbled with the engine(?) themselves.

Where should I start modding it, if possible?
What are the required tools needed?
Is there a compact/consistent place to find all the documentation available for the editor?
Is there any heads up I should keep note before going for it?

Once again, if anyone with experience with PGE/Moondust can reach out to me & inform me on what needs to be done, i'd highly appreciate that, thank you!

[deice]

the source code for the smbx2 editor can be found here. i believe the official build guide should work even if it's meant for the original version, and i'm fairly certain it's still up to date.

most if not all of the editor's gui elements are made in qt5, so getting the hang of that is probably a good idea, and then you can try working out some of the smbx-specific stuff as you go along. be aware though that the pge editor which the smbx2 editor is built on is a very large project that's been in development for over a decade by now, so this is not going to be nearly as easy as it might sound.

something even harder though is integrating it to work with an existing smbx2 installation, which i imagine you'll need some help from the dev team for. (as an aside, configurable keybinds and autotiling are still planned for a future version, to my knowledge)

[archived_acc]

Beta 5 is not open source, but the -outdated, Emral's fork should be enough to around with the editor.

As for the official guide, it doesn't work unfortunately (at least for Windows, I haven't on other OS). Yes you need CMake +3.5, 7Zip and Git, but you need a custom toolchain for QT and MinGW.

Here are the versions you need of QT and MinGW MinGW and Ninja.

• QT goes in C:/Qt/
• MinGW in C:/mingw-w64/
• Ninja in C:/mingw-w64/mingw64/bin

Then follow the guide as usual.
I use the 38A package because it's the most lightweight.

As for your other questions, I think you're better off with going at WohIstand's server to familiarize yourself with the code. Have fun!

[deice]

Beta 5 is not open source, but the -outdated, Emral's fork should be enough to around with the editor.

could you elaborate on what you mean by this? as far as i'm aware, there are no editor features present in smbx2 that are not also reflected in the commit history of the fork i linked to. is there any specific reason it's 'outdated', or do you just mean it's not caught up with the base pge editor in terms of features?

[archived_acc]

My bad, I did a bit of research and I think this fork effectively reflects the updates! I also don't know if it's caught up with PGE editor features since I haven't followed its development closely. I thought the X2 team was using a completely different branch and that this fork was deprecated